 Happy New Year, Kwonki Lee! If you missed last week's edition – the definitive reading list of the year's best books overall – you can catch up right here. And if you're enjoying this, please consider supporting with a modest donation – every little bit helps, and comes enormously appreciated.
 In 1994, Sherwin Nuland(1930–2014) – a remarkable surgeon and Yale clinical professor who in his nearly four decades of practice cared, trulycared, for more than 10,000 patients – received the National Book Award for his humanistic masterwork How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter (public library), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that year. It is one of the most existentially elevating books I've ever read – a inquiry as much into how we exit this life as into how we fill its living moments with meaning, integrity and, ultimately, happiness. Four years later, Nuland followed up with How We Live (public library), addressing the art of aliveness – that spectacular resilience of which the human body and mind are capable – with equal wisdom and warmth.
Shortly after Nuland's death in the spring of 2014, Krista Tippett – host of the sublime public radio show On Being and enchantress of the human spirit through the communion of conversation – shared her talk with Nuland, recorded several years earlier. The entire episode is absolutely fantastic, but one particular passage both illuminates the heart of Nuland's legacy and articulates beautifully an essential, elemental truth – the same one at which Tolstoy and Gandhi arrived – that we, both as individuals and as a civilization, so easily let ourselves forget:
 Do you know what I learned from writing [ How We Die], if I learned nothing else? The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are... And when I say universal, I don't mean universal only within our culture... There's a lot of balderdash thrown around – "You don't understand people who live in Sri Lanka and their response to the tsunami because you just don't know that culture."
Well, there's an element of that – but, to me, cultural differences are a kind of patina over the deepest psychosexual feelings that we have, that all human beings share.
To illustrate the inextricable connectedness of these deeper human truths, Nuland turns to a maxim that scholars attribute to the first-century Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo:"Be kind, for everyone you meet is carrying a great burden." The phrase, the spirit of which Lucinda Williams echoed in her sublime paean to compassion, appears in the epitaph of Nuland's excellent memoir of his father,Lost in America. He tells Tippett:
When you recognize that pain – and response to pain – is a universal thing, it helps explain so many things about others, just as it explains so much about yourself. It teaches you forbearance. It teaches you a moderation in your responses to other people's behavior. It teaches you a sort of understanding. It essentially tells you what everybody needs. You know what everybody needs? You want to put it in a single word?
Everybody needs to be understood.
And out of that comes every form of love.
If someone truly feels that you understand them, an awful lot of neurotic behavior just disappears – disappears on your part, disappears on their part. So if you're talking about what motivates this world to continue existing as a community, you've got to talk about love... And my argument is it comes out of your biology because on some level we understand all of this. We put it into religious forms. It's almost like an excuse to deny our biology. We put it into pithy, sententious aphorisms, but it's really coming out of our deepest physiological nature.
Listen to the full episode of On Being below and be sure to subscribe to this ennobling gift Krista Tippett puts into the world, then treat yourself to Nuland's indispensable How We Live and How We Die. Dive deeper into the latter here.
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 Rather than an annual ritual of promises made to be broken, the best New Year's resolutions – the ones that actually stick and transform our lives by rewiring our physical and psychologicalhabit loops – are enduring existential aspirations of which we remind ourselves when early January makes its convenient invitation for self-transformation. Famous resolution lists – like those of Italo Calvino,Jonathan Swift, Susan Sontag, Marilyn Monroe, Woody Guthrie, and Ursula Nordstrom – certainly embody this spirit. But hardly anyone does that more beautifully thanFriedrich Nietzsche in his classic 1882 treatise The Gay Science (public library) – the book he considered his most personal of all, in which his famous proclamation "God is dead" makes its first appearance.
In an entry from January of 1882 under the heading Sanctus Januarius, Nietzsche writes:
For the New Year—I still live, I still think; I must still live, for I must still think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. To-day everyone takes the liberty of expressing his wish and his favorite thought: well, I also mean to tell what I have wished for myself today, and what thought first crossed my mind this year,—a thought which ought to be the basis, the pledge and the sweetening of all my future life! I want more and more to perceive the necessary characters in things as the beautiful:—I shall thus be one of those who beautify things. Amor fati: let that henceforth be my love! I do not want to wage war with the ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not want even to accuse the accusers. Looking aside, let that be my sole negation! And all in all, to sum up: I wish to be at any time hereafter only a yea-sayer!
A resounding secular "Amen!" to that.
Complement The Gay Science, which remains a must-read in its totality, with Nietzsche's 10 rules for writers and his assuring case for why a fulfilling life requires embracing rather than running from difficulty.
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In December of 2011, Neil deGrasse Tyson– champion of science, celebrator of the cosmic perspective, master of the soundbite – participated in Reddit's Ask Me Anythingseries of public questions and answers. One reader posed the following question: "Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on the planet?" Adding to history's notable reading lists – including those by Leo Tolstoy, Alan Turing, Brian Eno,David Bowie, Stewart Brand, and Carl Sagan– Tyson offers the following eight essentials, each followed by a short, and sometimes wry, statement about "how the book’s content influenced the behavior of people who shaped the western world":
- The Bible (public library; free ebook), to learn that it's easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself
- The System of the World (public library; free ebook) by Isaac Newton, to learn that the universe is a knowable place
- On the Origin of Species (public library; free ebook) by Charles Darwin, to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth
- Gulliver's Travels (public library; free ebook) by Jonathan Swift, to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos
- The Age of Reason (public library; free ebook) by Thomas Paine, to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world
- The Wealth of Nations (public library; free ebook) by Adam Smith, to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself
- The Art of War (public library; free ebook) by Sun Tzu, to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art
- The Prince (public library; free ebook) by Machiavelli, to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it
Tyson adds:
If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world.
(What has driven it, evidently, is also the systematic exclusion of the female perspective. The prototypical "intelligent person" would be remiss not to also read, at the very least, Margaret Fuller's foundational text Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which is even available as a free ebook, and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. But, of course, the question of diversity is an infinite one and any list is bound to be pathologically unrepresentative of all of humanity – a challenge I've addressed elsewhere – so Tyson's selections remain indispensable despite their chromosomal lopsidedness. My hope, meanwhile, is that we'll begin to see more such reading lists by prominent female scientists, philosophers, artists, or writers of the past and present; to my knowledge, none have been made public as of yet – except perhaps Susan Sontag's diary, which is essentially a lifelong reading list.)
Complement with Nabokov on the six short stories every writer should read, then revisit Tyson on genius and the most humbling fact about the universe.
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 "People working in the arts engage in street combat with The Fraud Police on a daily basis,"Amanda Palmer wrote in her fantastic manifesto for the creative life, one of thebest books of the year, "because much of our work is new and not readily or conventionally categorized." Few artists in history have lived through this street combat with more dignity and resilience of spirit than French Post-Impressionist painter Henri Rousseau (May 21, 1844–September 2, 1910). Long before history came to celebrate him as one of the greatest artists of his era, long before he was honored by major retrospectives by such iconic institutions as the MoMA and the Tate Museum, long before Sylvia Plath began weaving homages to him into her poetry, he spent a lifetime being not merely dismissed but ridiculed. And yet Rousseau – who was born into poverty, began working alongside his plumber father as a young boy, still worked as a toll collector by the age of forty, and was entirely self-taught in painting – withstood the unending barrage of harsh criticism with which his art was met during his entire life, and continued to paint from a deep place of creative conviction, with an irrepressible impulse to make art anyway.
I was instantly taken with The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau (public library) by writer Michelle Markel and illustratorAmanda Hall not only because I have a soft spot for beautifully illustrated biographies that introduce young readers to inspiring cultural icons – such as those of Pablo Neruda, Julia Child, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Maria Merian, and Jane Goodall – but also because it tells an emboldening real-life story, and a stunningly illustrated one, of remarkable resilience and optimism in the face of public criticism, of cultivating a center so solid and a creative vision so unflinching that no outside attack can demolish it and obstruct its transmutation into greatness.
Henri Rousseau wants to be an artist.
Not a single person has ever told him he is talented.
He's a toll collector.
He's forty years old.
But he buys some canvas, paint, and brushes, and starts painting anyway.
Rousseau's impulse for art sprang from his deep love of nature – a manifestation of the very thing that seventeen-year-old Virginia Woolf intuited when she wrote in her diary thatthe arts "imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see".
Unable to afford art lessons, Rousseau educated himself by going to the Louvre to study the paintings of his favorite artists and examining photographs, magazines, and catalogs to learn about the anatomy of the human body.
At the age of forty-one, he showed his work as part of a big art exhibition, but his art – vibrant, flat, seemingly childish – was met, as Markel writes, with "only mean things." Even so, Rousseau saved the reviews and pasted them into his scrapbook.
With his voracious appetite for inspiration, Rousseau visited the World's Fair, where he was especially enchanted by the exhibits of exotic lands. "They remind him of adventure stories he loved when he was a boy," Markel writes. The vivid images haunted him for days, until he finally turned to the easel to exorcise his restless imagination.
He holds his paintbrush to the canvas. A tiger crawls out. Lightning strikes, and wind whips the jungle grass.
Sometimes Henri is so startled by what he paints that he has to open the window to let in some air.
But for all his earnest creative exuberance, he is met with derision.
Every year Henri goes back to the art exhibition to show new paintings. He fusses over the canvases and retouches them until the last minute.
And every year the art experts make fun of him. They say it looks like he closed his eyes and painted with his feet.
And yet Rousseau manages to embody Georgia O'Keeffe's credo that "whether you succeed or not is irrelevant... making your unknown known is the important thing" – he continues to paint, to study nature, and to rejoice in the process itself.
One night, he dreams up a painting of which he is especially proud, depicting a lion looking over a sleeping gypsy with friendly curiosity.
Once again he takes his work to the art show. This time, perhaps, he'll please the experts. His pulse races.
The experts say he paints like a child. "If you want to have a good laugh," one of them writes, "go see the paintings by Henri Rousseau."
By now Henry is used to the nasty critics. He knows his shapes are simpler and flatter than everyone else's, but he thinks that makes them lovely.
Everything he earns by giving music lessons, he spends on art supplies. But he lives byThoreau's definition of success.
His home is a shabby little studio, where one pot of stew must last the whole week. But every morning he wakes up and smiles at his pictures.
At sixty-one, Rousseau is still living in poverty, but happily paints his jubilant junglescapes. He continues to hope for critical acclaim and continues to be denied it, cruelly, by the "experts," one of whom even says that "only cavemen would be impressed by his art."
At last, Rousseau, already an old man, gets a break – but the recognition comes from a new generation of younger artists, who befriend him and come to admire his work. More than his talent and his stomach for criticism, however, one comes to admire his immensely kind and generous heart.
Whenever Henri has money to spare, and stages a concert in his little studio, all the artists come. Along with the grocer, locksmith, and other folks from the neighborhood, they listen to Henri's students and friends play their musical instruments. Henri gives the shiniest, reddest apples to the children.
Eventually, even Picasso pays heed and throws old Henri a banquet, at which "the old man sits upon a makeshift throne" playing his violin as people dance and celebrate around him, his heart floating "like a hot-air balloon above the fields."
At the end of his life, Rousseau paints his masterwork "The Dream" and finally becomes successful by a public standard as the critics, at last, grant him acclaim. But the beautiful irony and the ennobling message of the story is that he was successful all along, for he had found his purpose – a feat with which even Van Gogh struggled for years – and filled each day with the invigorating joy of making his unknown known.
A hundred years later, the flowers still blossom, the monkeys still frolic, and the snakes keep slithering through Henri's hot jungles. His paintings now hang in museums all over the world. And do you think experts call them "foolish," "clumsy," or "monstrous"? Mais non! They call them works of art.
By an old man,
by a onetime toll collector,
by one of the most gifted self-taught artists in history:
Henri Rousseau
The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseauis absolutely wonderful from cover to cover. Complement it with Ray Bradbury onweathering the storm of rejection and Picasso on why you should never compromise in your art.
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The psychology of the perfect daily routine, how to criticize with kindness, the creative purpose of boredom, Kafka on what books do for the soul, and more.
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"Being an artist is not just about what happens when you are in the studio. The way you live, the people you choose to love and the way you love them, the way you vote, the words that come out of your mouth... will also become the raw material for the art you make."
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"One sign of a great work of literature or art is that it can be interpreted multiple ways, that it remains ambiguous, refusing to provide clear-cut answers."
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"It is rare and genuine and does justice to the private world of children. One can, after all, count on the instincts of a genius."
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What a continent's "rich tapestry of intuitive forces" can teach us about healing, of body and of soul.
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A visionary take on classic stories that continue to give us "a tingling, anything-may-happen feeling... the sensation of being about to bite into a big juicy pear."
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How the most creative human who ever lived was able to access a different state of consciousness.
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"The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings."
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"I embrace you with all my heart."
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"Cut short of the floundering and you've cut short the possible creative outcomes. Cheat on the chaotic stumbling-about, and you've robbed yourself of the raw stuff that feeds the imagination."
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"A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living."
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"A library is no place for three lost mice."
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