 Hey Kwonki Lee! If you missed last week's edition – how we become who we are, Mark Twain on learning compassion, an illustrated homage to the secret sidekicks behind creative geniuses, Maira Kalman's illustrated catalog of unusual objects and delights, 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.
 Since our cave-dwelling days, the question of why we make art and why we enjoy it has haunted us as a perennial specter of the human experience. For Leo Tolstoy, it was about the transference of "emotional infectiousness"; for Jeanette Winterson, about"active surrender"; for Oscar Wilde, aboutcultivating a "temperament of receptivity."
That question is what beloved Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda answers with unparalleled elegance in a short essay from the early 1950s titled "Childhood and Poetry," found in the altogether enchanting collection Neruda and Vallejo (public library).
Neruda relays an anecdote from his childhood that profoundly influenced not only his poetry but also his understanding of art and of life itself:
 One time, investigating in the backyard of our house in Temuco the tiny objects and minuscule beings of my world, I came upon a hole in one of the boards of the fence. I looked through the hole and saw a landscape like that behind our house, uncared for, and wild. I moved back a few steps, because I sensed vaguely that something was about to happen. All of a sudden a hand appeared – a tiny hand of a boy about my own age. By the time I came close again, the hand was gone, and in its place there was a marvelous white sheep.
The sheep’s wool was faded. Its wheels had escaped. All of this only made it more authentic. I had never seen such a wonderful sheep. I looked back through the hole, but the boy had disappeared. I went into the house and brought out a treasure of my own: a pinecone, opened, full of odor and resin, which I adored. I set it down in the same spot and went off with the sheep.
He never saw the hand nor the boy it belonged to again. The lamb toy perished in a fire years later. But that boyhood encounter, with the simplicity of its symbolism, impressed upon him a lifelong learning – the second he grasped that faded-wool lamb he grasped a deep truth about the longing for mutuality that impels us to make art:
To feel the intimacy of brothers is a marvelous thing in life. To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses – that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.
That exchange brought home to me for the first time a precious idea: that all of humanity is somehow together...
It won’t surprise you then that I attempted to give something resiny, earthlike, and fragrant in exchange for human brotherhood. Just as I once left the pinecone by the fence, I have since left my words on the door of so many people who were unknown to me, people in prison, or hunted, or alone.
Also included in the volume is a 1966 interview by Bly under the title "The Lamb and the Pine Cone," in which Neruda revisits the formative incident and how it shaped his understanding of the creative experience:
This exchange of gifts – mysterious – settled deep inside me like a sedimentary deposit.
Neruda and Vallejo is a joy in its entirety. Complement it with Tom O'Bedlam's beautiful reading of Neruda's "Ode to the Book" and Robert Henri on how art binds us together.
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 Long before Galileo pioneered the telescope,antagonizing the churchand unleashing a"hummingbird effect" of innovation, humanity had been busy cataloging the heavens through millennia of imaginative speculative maps of the cosmos. We have always sought to make visible the invisible forces we long to understand, the mercy and miracle of existence, and nothing beckons to us with more intense allure than the majesty and mystery of the universe.
Four millennia of that mesmerism-made-visible is what journalist, photographer, and astrovisualization scholar Michael Bensonexplores with great dedication and discernment in Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time (public library) – a pictorial catalog of our quest to order the cosmos and grasp our place in it, a sensemaking process defined by what Benson aptly calls our "gradually dawning, forever incomplete situational awareness." From glorious paintings of the creation myth predating William Blake's work by centuries to the pioneering galaxy drawing that inspired Van Gogh's Starry Night to NASA's maps of the Apollo 11 landing site, the images remind us that the cosmos – like Whitman, like ourselves – is vast and contains multitudes. This masterwork of scholarship also attests, ever so gently, ever so powerfully, to the value of the "ungoogleable" – a considerable portion of Benson's bewitching images comes from the vaults of the world's great science libraries and archives, bringing to light a wealth of previously unseen treasures.
Illustration from Henry Russell’s 1892 treatise 'Observations of the Transit of Venus.'
The book's title is an allusion to Italo Calvino's beloved Cosmicomics, a passage from which Benson deploys as the epigraph:
In the universe now there was no longer a container and a thing contained, but only a general thickness of signs, superimposed and coagulated, occupying the whole volume of space; it was constantly being dotted, minutely, a network of lines and scratches and reliefs and engravings; the universe was scrawled over on all sides, along all its dimensions. There was no longer any way to establish a point of reference; the Galaxy went on turning but I could no longer count the revolutions, any point could be the point of departure, any sign heaped up with the others could be mine, but discovering it would have served no purpose, because it was clear that, independent of signs, space didn't exist and perhaps had never existed.
Long before the notion of vacuum existed in cosmology, English physician and cosmologist Robert Fludd captured the concept of non-space in his 1617 creation series, which depicts multiple chaotic fires subsiding until a central starlike structure becomes visible amid concentric rings of smoke and debris. Even though Fludd believed in a geocentric cosmology, this image comes strikingly close to current theories of solar system formation.
Paintings of Saturn by German astronomer-artist Maria Clara Eimmart, a pioneering woman in science, from 1693–1698. Eimmart's depictions are based on a 1659 engraving by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, the first to confirm that Saturn’s mysterious appendages, which had confounded astronomers since Galileo, were in fact 'a thin flat ring, nowhere touching.' What makes Eimmart's painting unique is that it combines the observations of more than ten astronomers into a depiction of superior accuracy.
In 1845, Anglo-Irish astronomer William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, equipped his castle with a giant six-ton telescope, soon nicknamed the 'Leviathan,' which remained the largest telescope in the world until 1918. Despite the cloudy Irish skies, Lord Rosse managed to glimpse and draw the spellbinding spiral structures of what were thought to be nebulae within the Milky Way. This print, based on Lord Rosse’s drawing of one such nebula — M51, known today as the Whirlpool Galaxy — became a sensation throughout Europe and inspired Van Gogh's iconic 'The Starry Night.'
The project, which does for space whatCartographies of Time did for the invisible dimension, also celebrates the natural marriage of art and science. These early astronomers were often spectacular draughtsmen as well – take, for instance,Johannes Hevelius and his groundbreaking catalog of stars. As Benson points out, art and science were "essentially fused" until about the 17th century and many of the creators of the images in the book were also well-versed in optics, anatomy, and the natural sciences.
A 1573 painting by Portuguese artist, historian, and philosopher Francisco de Holanda, a student of Michelangelo's, envisions the creation of the Ptolemaic universe by an omnipotent creator.
De Holanda was fascinated by the geometry of the cosmos, particularly the triangular form and its interplay with the circle.
This cryptic and unsettling 'Fool’s Cap Map of the World' (1580–1590), made by an unknown artist, appropriates French mathematician and cartographer Oronce Finé’s cordiform, or heart-shaped, projection of the Earth; the world in this iconic image is dressed in a jester’s belled cap, beneath which a Latin inscription from Ecclesiastes reads: 'The number of fools is infinite.'
The book is, above all, a kind of conceptual fossil record of how our understanding of the universe evolved, visualizing through breathtaking art the "fits and starts of ignorance" by which science progresses – many of the astronomers behind these enchanting images weren't "scientists" in the modern sense but instead dabbled in alchemy, astrology, and various rites driven by religion and superstition. (For instance, Isaac Newton, often celebrated as the greatest scientist of all time, spent a considerable amount of his youth self-flagellating over his sins, and trying to discover "The Philosopher's Stone," a mythic substance believed to transmute ordinary metals into gold. And one of the gorgeous images in Benson's catalog comes from a 1907 children's astronomy book I happen to own, titled The Book of Stars for Young People, the final pages of which have always struck me with their counterblast: "Far out in space lies this island of a system, and beyond the gulfs of space are other suns, with other systems: some may be akin to ours and some quite different... The whole implies design, creation, and the working of a mighty intelligence; and yet there are small, weak creatures here on this little globe who refuse to believe in God.")
A 1493 woodcut by German physician and cartographer Hartmann Schedel, depicting the seventh day, or Sabbath, when God rested.
The Nebra Sky Disc (2000–1600 B.C.), excavated illegally in Germany in 1999, is considered to be both humanity's first-known portable astronomical instrument and the oldest-known visual depiction of celestial objects.
One of the phases of the moon from Selenographia, world's first lunar atlas completed by German-Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius in 1647 after years of obsessive observations. Hevelius also created history's first true moon map.
Beginning in 1870, French-born artist and astronomer Étienne Trouvelot spent a decade producing a series of spectacular illustrations of celestial bodies and cosmic phenomena. In 1872, he joined the Harvard College Observatory and began using its powerful telescopes in perfecting his drawings. His pastel illustrations, including this chromolithograph of Mare Humorum, a vast impact basin on the southwest side of the Earth-facing hemisphere of the moon, were among the first serious attempts to enlist art in popularizing the results of observations using technology developed for scientific research.
Étienne Trouvelot's 1873 engravings of solar phenomena, produced during his first year at the Harvard College Observatory for the institution's journal. The legend at the bottom reveals that the distance between the two prominences in the lower part of the engraving is one hundred thousand miles, more than 12 times the diameter of Earth. Despite the journal's modest circulation, such engravings were soon co-opted by more mainstream publications and became trailblazing tools of science communication that greatly influenced public understanding of the universe's scale.
What makes Benson's project especially enchanting is the strange duality it straddles: On the one hand, the longing to make tangible and visible the complex forces that rule our existence is a deeply human one; on the other, the notion of simplifying such expansive complexities into static images seems paradoxical to a dangerous degree – something best captured by pioneering astronomer Maria Mitchell when she marveled: "The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power! We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us."
Unable to seize the infinite, are we fooling ourselves by trying to reduce it into a seizable visual representation? At what point do we, like Calvino's protagonist, begin to mistake the presence or absence of "signs" for the presence or absence of space itself? It calls to mind Susan Sontag's concern about how photography's "aesthetic consumerism" endangers the real experience of life, which the great physicist Werner Heisenberg channeled decades earlier in a remark that exposes the dark side of visualizing the universe:
Contemporary thought is endangered by the picture of nature drawn by science. This danger lies in the fact that the picture is now regarded as an exhaustive account of nature itself so that science forgets that in its study of nature it is studying its own picture.
Plate from Thomas Wright’s 1750 treatise 'An Original Theory,' depicting Wright's trailblazing notion that the universe is composed of multiple galaxies.
And yet awe, the only appropriate response to the cosmos, is a visceral feeling by nature and thus has no choice but to engage our "aesthetic consumerism" – which is why the yearning at the heart of Benson's project is a profoundly human one. He turns to the words of the pioneering English astronomer and mathematician Thomas Wright, whose 1750 book An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe Benson considers "one of the best-case studies of scientific reasoning through image." Wright marvels:
What inconceivable vastness and magnificence of power does such a frame unfold! Suns crowding upon Suns, to our weak sense, indefinitely distant from each other; and myriads of myriads of mansions, like our own, peopling infinity, all subject to the same Creator’s will; a universe of worlds, all decked with mountains, lakes, and seas, herbs, animals, and rivers, rocks, caves, and trees... Now, thanks to the sciences, the scene begins to open to us on all sides, and truths scarce to have been dreamt of before persons of observation had proved them possible, invade our senses with a subject too deep for the human understanding, and where our very reason is lost in infinite wonders.
Illuminated solar eclipse prediction tables by German miniaturist Joachinus de Gigantibus, from the 1478 scientific treatise 'Astronomia' by Tuscan-Neopolitan humanist Christianus Prolianus.
NASA's 1979 geological map of the south polar region of the moon, part of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Illustration from G. E. Mitton’s 'The Book of Stars for Young People,' 1907
Artist-astronomer Étienne Trouvelot's drawing of the total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878, in Wyoming.
Cosmigraphics is a treasure trove in its entirety. Complement it with a tour of parallel facets of humanity's visual imagination, Umberto Eco's atlas of legendary lands and Manuel Lima's visual history of tree-like diagrams, then revisit the little-known story ofhow Galileo influenced Shakespeare and thislovely children's book about space exploration.
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 "How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say OK?" Maira Kalman asked in pondering happiness and existence. What is it that propels us to get up after loss, after heartbreak, after failure? What is that immutable rope that pulls us out of our own depths – depths we hardly know until that moment when the light of the surface vanishes completely and unreachably?
That's precisely what the Reverend Victoria Stafford explores in a gorgeous essay titled"The Small Work in the Great Work" fromThe Impossible Will Take a Little While: Perseverance and Hope in Troubled Times(public library) – a soul-stretching collection of reflections by such luminaries as Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, Diane Ackerman, Alice Walker, Bill Moyers, and Nelson Mandela, edited by social activist Paul Loeband titled after Billie Holiday's famous song lyric, "The difficult I’ll do right now. The impossible will take a little while."
Artwork by William Blake for Dante's Divine Comedy
Stafford considers what motivated the men and women who marched in the first LGBT pride parades four decades ago – what beyond courage and imagination. In a beautiful sentiment that calls to mind Charles Bukowski's poem about the irrepressible impulse that drives creative work, Stafford channels what these visionary marchers might tell us:
Once you have glimpsed the world as it might be, as it ought to be, as it’s going to be (however that vision appears to you), it is impossible to live compliant and complacent anymore in the world as it is... And so you come out and walk out and march, the way a flower comes out and blooms, because it has no other calling. It has no other work.
[...]
I am interested in what Seamus Heaney calls the meeting point of hope and history, where what has happened is met by what we make of it. What has happened is met midstream by people who are – among the multitude of things we are – spiritual beings and all that that implies of creativity, imagination, crazy wisdom, ancient wisdom, passionate compassion, selfless courage, and radical reverence for life. And love—for one another absolutely, and that love that rises out of us, for something larger than ourselves, call it what you will. I am interested in the place, the places, where history is met by the hope of the human soul, life’s longing for itself. I am interested in hope on this side of the grave – for me there is no other kind – and in that tidal wave of justice that could rise up if only we would let it.
Reflecting on the "particular, precise disaster" of September 11 and how "silence made its holy way" among those bearing witness, Stafford argues that this longing, this hope, is all the more piercing in such moments of unholy din. She illustrates this with a poignant anecdote:
I have a friend who traffics in words. She is not a minister, but a psychiatrist in the health clinic at a prestigious women’s college. We were sitting once not long after a student she had known, and counseled, committed suicide in the dormitory there. My friend, the doctor, the healer, held the loss very closely in those first few days, not unprofessionally, but deeply, fully – as you or I would have, had this been someone in our care.
At one point (with tears streaming down her face), she looked up in defiance (this is the only word for it) and spoke explicitly of her vocation, as if out of the ashes of that day she were renewing a vow or making a new covenant (and I think she was). She spoke explicitly of her vocation, and of yours and mine. She said, “You know I cannot save them. I am not here to save anybody or to save the world. All I can do – what I am called to do – is to plant myself at the gates of Hope. Sometimes they come in; sometimes they walk by. But I stand there every day and I call out till my lungs are sore with calling, and beckon and urge them in toward beautiful life and love...
There’s something for all of us there, I think. Whatever our vocation, we stand, beckoning and calling, singing and shouting, planted at the gates of Hope. This world and our people are beautiful and broken, and we are called to raise that up – to bear witness to the possibility of living with the dignity, bravery, and gladness that befits a human being. That may be what it is to “live our mission."
That mission, of course, is different for each of us. We can't – nor need we – all be psychiatrists reigning desperate souls in from the edge. In our age of "troubled times," per the book's title, so much of that fear and so little of that despairingly necessary hope is being mongered by the media – which calls to mind E.B. White's urgently unforgettable assertion that a writer's duty is "to lift people up, not lower them down."
Artwork by Maira Kalman from The Principles of Uncertainty
Stafford, that rare kind of writer who does the heavy lifting with immeasurable grace, considers what is required of us – what we owe ourselves and each other – in planting ourselves gently but unflinchingly in our mission:
We stand where we will stand, on little plots of ground, where we are maybe “called” to stand (though who knows what that means?) – in our congregations, classrooms, offices, factories, in fields of lettuces and apricots, in hospitals, in prisons (on both sides, at various times, of the gates), in streets, in community groups. And it is sacred ground if we would honor it, if we would bring to it a blessing of sacrifice and risk...
Our mission is to plant ourselves at the gates of Hope – not the prudent gates of Optimism, which are somewhat narrower; nor the stalwart, boring gates of Common Sense; nor the strident gates of Self-Righteousness, which creak on shrill and angry hinges (people cannot hear us there; they cannot pass through); nor the cheerful, flimsy garden gate of “Everything is gonna be all right.” But a different, sometimes lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about your own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle. And we stand there, beckoning and calling, telling people what we are seeing, asking people what they see.
The remainder of The Impossible Will Take a Little While is just as vitalizing, just as tenderly tenacious at lighting that inner fire that warms us out of our complacency and cynicism, those virulent specters of contemporary culture which we, in a billion daily ways, choose to propagate or choose to eradicate.
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 J.R.R. Tolkien memorably asserted that there is no such thing as writing "for children" and Maurice Sendak similarly scoffed thatwe shouldn't shield young minds from the dark. It's a sentiment that Neil Gaiman– one of the most enchanting and prolific writers of our time, a champion of the creative life, underappreciated artist,disciplined writer, and sage of literature – not only shares, in contemplating but also enacts beautifully in his work. More than a decade after his bewitching and widely belovedCoraline, Gaiman returns with another terrific embodiment of this ethos – his adaptation of the Brothers Grimm classic Hansel & Gretel(public library), illustrated by Italian graphic artist Lorenzo Mattotti, the talent behind Lou Reed's adaptation of The Raven.
The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm have attracted a wealth of reimaginings over their long history, including interpretations as wide-ranging as those by David Hockney in 1970,Edward Gorey in 1973, and Philip Pullman in 2012. But Gaiman's is decidedly singular – a mesmerizing rolling cadence of language propelling a story that speaks to the part of the soul that revels in darkness but is immutably drawn to the light, that listens for the peculiar crescendo where the song of the dream becomes indistinguishable from the scream of the nightmare.
With stark subtlety, Mattotti's haunting visual interpretation amplifies the atmosphere that Gaiman so elegantly evokes.
In this wonderful short video, Gaiman discusses what makes fairy tales endure with legendary graphic storyteller Art Spiegelman and longtime New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly:
I think if you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up. I think it is really important to show dark things to kids – and, in the showing, to also show that dark things can be beaten, that you have power. Tell them you can fight back, tell them you can win. Because you can – but you have to know that.
And for me, the thing that is so big and so important about the darkness is [that] it’s like in an inoculation... You are giving somebody darkness in a form that is not overwhelming – it’s understandable, they can envelop it, they can take it into themselves, they can cope with it. And, it’s okay, it’s safe to tell you that story – as long as you tell them that you can be smart, and you can be brave, and you can be tricky, and you can be plucky, and you can keep going.
Hansel & Gretel is wholly enthralling from cover to cover. It is also available as a deluxe edition – a lavish large-format volume with a die-cut cover, and dog knows die-cut treatsare impossible to resist.
Complement it with Gaiman on why scary stories appeal to us, Tolkien on the psychology of fairy tales, and the best illustrations of the Brothers Grimm tales. For more of Mattotti's enchanting art, see hisvisual interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe.
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 In a 1915 letter to his young son, Albert Einstein advised that the best way to learn anything is "when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes." Many decades later, psychologists would give a name to this distinctive, exhilarating state of immersive, self-initiated learning and creative growth: flow. Again and again, artists, writers, scientists, and other creators have described this state as the key to the "spiritual electricity" of creative work.
In 1966, legendary jazz pianist Bill Evans(August 16, 1929–September 15, 1980) sat down with his composer brother, Harry Evans, for an intense and deeply insightful conversation later released as Universal Mind of Bill Evans: The Creative Process and Self-Teaching. From filmmaker William Meier comes this gorgeous cinematic adaptation of Evans's thoughts on the autodidactic quality of creativity and the value of working at the intersection of clarity, complexity, and spontaneity.
Here is a longer excerpt from the documentary, where Evans discusses the step-by-step process of creative problem-solving:
The whole process of learning the facility of being able to play jazz is to take these problems from the outer level in, one by one, and to stay with it at a very intense, conscious-concentration level until that process becomes secondary and subconscious. Now, when that becomes subconscious, then you can begin concentrating on that next problem, which will allow you to do a little bit more.
I don’t consider myself as talented as many people but in some ways that was an advantage because I didn’t have a great facility immediately so I had to be more analytical and in a way – that forced me to build something.
Most people just don’t realize the immensity of the problem and, either because they can’t conquer it immediately, think that they haven’t got the ability, or they’re so impatient to conquer it that they never do see it through. If you do understand the problem then you can enjoy your whole trip through.
People tend to approximate the product rather than attacking it in a realistic, true way at any elementary level – regardless of how elementary – but it must be entirely true and entirely real and entirely accurate. They would rather approximate the entire problem than to take a small part of it and be real and true about it. To approximate the whole thing in a vague way gives you a feeling that you’ve more or less touched the thing, but in this way you just lead yourself toward confusion and ultimately you’re going to get so confused that you’ll never find your way out.
It is true of any subject that the person that succeeds in anything has the realistic viewpoint at the beginning and [knows] that the problem is large and that he has to take it a step at a time and that he has to enjoy the step-by-step learning procedure. They’re trying to do a thing in a way that is so general [that] they can’t possibly build on that. If they build on that, they’re building on top of confusion and vagueness and they can’t possibly progress. If you try to approximate something that is very advanced and don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t advance.
Universal Mind of Bill Evans is revelatory in its entirety. Complement it with the great composer Aaron Copland on the conditions of creativity and Julia Cameron on how to get out of your own way and unblock creative flow.
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A die-cut history of how the dinosaurs became birds and humans rose from the sea.
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"After all, the great problem of life seems to be how to keep body and soul together."
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Celebrating the significance of small things and the iron bolts that hold butterfly wings together.
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"And please believe me when I tell you: successful people are never sore losers."
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A simple reminder that nothing undoes dignity like peevish indignation.
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"True art, when it happens to us, challenges the 'I' that we are."
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"Darker emotions may well put on the mask of quite unworldly things."
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The cat listicle goes pop art half a century before cat listicles existed.
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A tender, thoughtful lens on life and love in the margins.
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A beautiful and subtle ode to the fleeting moment between a bird and a balloon.
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A warm and wonderful celebration of the paradoxes and perplexities that make us human.
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"There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment."
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How the invisible hand of the clock powered the Industrial Revolution and sparked the Information Age.
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"The points at which our unwisdom bites and messes up our lives are multiple and urgently need attention, right now."
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A celebration of makers and hackers from half a century before they were called makers and hackers.
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"A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own – that is, the written word."
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"A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it."
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"The present task of the constructive pacifist is to call attention away from the catchwords which so easily in wartime become the substitute for both facts and ideas back to realities."
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