 Hello, Kwonki Lee! If you missed last week's edition – Mary Oliver on how habit gives shape to our inner lives, what math reveals about the secret of lasting relationships, how a dog actually "sees" the world through smell, an illustrated love letter to nature, 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.
 "This is the greatest damn thing about the universe," Henry Miller wrote in hismagnificent meditation on the meaning of existence, "that we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can’t grasp it." Paradoxically enough, the fragment of the universe we seem least equipped to grasp is the truth of who we ourselves are. Who are we, really, when we silence the ego's shrill commands about who we should be, and simply listen to the song of life as it sings itself through us?
That's what French-born, Baltimore-based artist Jean-Pierre Weill explores in The Well of Being (public library) – an extraordinary "children's book for adults," three years in the making, that peers into the depths of the human experience and the meaning of our existence, tracing how the stories we tell ourselves to construct our personae obscure the truth of our personhood, and how we can untell them in order to just be.
Succumbing neither to religiosity nor to scientism, neither to myth nor to materialism, Weill dances across the Big Bang, the teachings of the 18th-century Italian philosopher and mystic Ramchal, evolution, 9/11, and life's most poetic and philosophical dimensions. He tells the lyrical story of a man – an androgynous being who "represents Everyman and also Everywoman," as Weill explains in the endnotes – moving from the origin of the universe to the perplexities of growing up to the mystery of being alive. At the center of it is the unity of life and the connectedness of the universe, "our encounter with One, well-being."
What emerges from Weill's ethereal watercolors and enchanting words is a secular scripture, at once grounding and elevating – a gentle prod to awaken from the trance of our daily circumstances and live with openhearted immediacy, a message partway between Seneca's exhortation to stop living in expectancy and Mary Oliver's invitation to begin belonging to this world.
 I see that you're reading. As the train is late let me take you on an excursion to the place we long for. I ask of you one thing: bring attention to your thoughts, those that take you from this book, quiet them... and value this listening as if it were a mysterious gift yours for the taking. Let us string a bead of thought, an article of faith.
Our existence is not an accident but a mystery... We can entrust ourselves to this mystery, for we are part of it. Indeed we are it.
I don't say there isn't much work to do, for there is. And some tracks lead to excruciating darkness, where a person can tumble from the sky on a clear September morning. Yet is the world not whole? Is it not beautiful? For now, let's consider well-being a choice, something you can try on and wear. When we put on the hat and coat of well-being we incline towards joy without special occasion.
At the heart of the lyrical story is the somewhat discomfiting yet necessary reminder that although our self-delusions are an adaptive crutch and the masks we wear are a protective survival mechanism, unless we learn to revise our inner storytelling and let ourselves be seen, we will continue to keep ourselves small with the stories we tell ourselves.
Weill writes:
We organize our circumstances into stories, stories we pick up along the way and carry with us. Stories that declare, I'm lacking. Why me? stories. I'm alone, stories. What will I amount to?stories. Stories about who we should be. Or think we are.
They are interior maps whose familiar roads we travel. Over and over. Yet when we apprehend these maps, these stories, these patterns ... we awaken and rise, as it were, to a new perspective, to new possibilities.
Complement the immeasurably wonderfulThe Well of Being with Seth Godin's very different and yet similar-in-spirit "children's book for grownups" about creative courage and living with vulnerability, then revisitDostoyevsky's existential epiphany and drink from Anne Lamott's well of being with her soul-stretching inquiry into how we find meaning in a crazy world.
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 "To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact,"asserted Charles Darwin in one of the eleven rules for critical thinking known as Prospero's Precepts. If science and human knowledge progress in leaps and bounds of ignorance, then the recognition of error and the transcendence of falsehood are the springboard for the leaps of progress. That's the premise behind This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress (public library) – a compendium of answers Edge founderJohn Brockman collected by posing hisannual question – "What scientific idea is ready for retirement?" – to 175 of the world's greatest scientists, philosophers, and writers. Among them are Nobel laureates, MacArthur geniuses, and celebrated minds like theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, psychologist Howard Gardner, social scientist and technology scholarSherry Turkle, actor and author Alan Alda, futurist and Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, and novelist, essayist, and screenwriter Ian McEwan.
Brockman paints the backdrop for the inquiry:
Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) noted, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, science advances by a series of funerals.
Many of the answers are redundant – but this is a glorious feature rather than a bug of Brockman's series, for its chief reward is precisely this cumulative effect of discerning the zeitgeist of ideas with which some of our era's greatest minds are tussling in synchronicity. They point to such retirement-ready ideas as IQ, the self, race, the left brain vs. right brain divide, human nature and essentialism, free will, and even science itself. What emerges is the very thing Carl Sagan deemed vital to truth in hisBaloney Detection Kit – a "substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view."
One of the most profound undercurrents across the answers has to do with our relationship with knowledge, certainty, and science itself. And one of the most profound contributions in that regard comes from MacArthur fellow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a philosopher who thinks deeply and dimensionally about some of the most complex questions of existence. Assailing the idea that science makes philosophy obsolete – that science is the transformation of "philosophy’s vagaries into empirically testable theories" and philosophy merely the "cold-storage room in which questions are shelved until the sciences get around to handling them" – Goldstein writes:
The obsolescence of philosophy is often taken to be a consequence of science. After all, science has a history of repeatedly inheriting – and definitively answering – questions over which philosophers have futilely hemmed and hawed for unconscionable amounts of time.
The gravest problem with this theory, Goldstein notes, is its internal incoherence:
You can’t argue for science making philosophy obsolete without indulging in philosophical arguments... When pressed for an answer to the so-called demarcation problem, scientists almost automatically reach for the notion of “falsifiability” first proposed by Karl Popper. His profession? Philosophy. But whatever criterion you offer, its defense is going to implicate you in philosophy.
This is something that Dorion Sagan, Carl Sagan's son, has previously addressed, but Goldstein brings to it unparalleled elegance of thought and eloquence of expression:
A triumphalist scientism needs philosophy to support itself. And the lesson here should be generalized. Philosophy is joined to science in reason’s project. Its mandate is to render our views and our attitudes maximally coherent.
In doing so, she argues, philosophy provides "the reasoning that science requires in order to claim its image as descriptive." As a proponent of the vital difference between information and wisdom– the former being the material of science, the latter the product of philosophy, and knowledge the change agent that transmutes one into the other – I find the provocative genius of Goldstein's conclusion enormously invigorating:
What idea should science retire? The idea of “science” itself. Let’s retire it in favor of the more inclusive “knowledge.”
In a further testament to the zeitgeist-illuminating nature of the project, actor, author, and science-lover Alan Alda makes a passionate case for the same concept:
The trouble with truth is that not only is the notion of eternal, universal truth highly questionable, but simple, local truths are subject to refinement as well. Up is up and down is down, of course. Except under special circumstances. Is the North Pole up and the South Pole down? Is someone standing at one of the poles right-side up or upside-down? Kind of depends on your perspective.
When I studied how to think in school, I was taught that the first rule of logic was that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. That last note, “in the same respect,” says a lot. As soon as you change the frame of reference, you’ve changed the truthiness of a once immutable fact.
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This is not to say that nothing is true or that everything is possible – just that it might not be so helpful for things to be known as true for all time, without a disclaimer... I wonder – and this is just a modest proposal – whether scientific truth should be identified in a way acknowledging that it’s something we know and understand for now, and in a certain way.
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Facts, it seems to me, are workable units, useful in a given frame or context. They should be as exact and irrefutable as possible, tested by experiment to the fullest extent. When the frame changes, they don’t need to be discarded as untrue but respected as still useful within their domain. Most people who work with facts accept this, but I don’t think the public fully gets it.
That’s why I hope for more wariness about implying we know something to be true or false for all time and for everywhere in the cosmos.
And indeed this elasticity of truth across time is at the heart of what I find to be the most beautiful and culturally essential contribution to the collection. As someone who believes that the stewardship of enduring ideas is at least as important as the genesis of new ones – not only because past ideas are the combinatorial building blocks of future ones but also because in order to move forward we always need a backdrop against which to paint the contrast of progress and improvement – I was most bewitched by writer Ian McEwan’s admonition against the arrogance of retiring any idea as an impediment to progress:
Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing! A great and rich scientific tradition should hang onto everything it has. Truth is not the only measure. There are ways of being wrong that help others to be right. Some are wrong, but brilliantly so. Some are wrong but contribute to method. Some are wrong but help found a discipline. Aristotle ranged over the whole of human knowledge and was wrong about much. But his invention of zoology alone was priceless. Would you cast him aside? You never know when you might need an old idea. It could rise again one day to enhance a perspective the present cannot imagine. It would not be available to us if it were fully retired.
To appreciate McEwan's point, one need only look at something like Bertrand Russell's timely thoughts on boredom, penned in 1930 and yet astoundingly resonant with our present anxieties about the societal side effects of current technology. McEwan captures this beautifully:
Every last serious and systematic speculation about the world deserves to be preserved. We need to remember how we got to where we are, and we’d like the future not to retire us. Science should look to literature and maintain a vibrant living history as a monument to ingenuity and persistence. We won’t retire Shakespeare. Nor should we Bacon.
Neuroscientist Sam Harris, author of the indispensable Spirituality Without Religion, echoes this by choosing our narrow definition of "science" as the idea to be put to rest:
Search your mind, or pay attention to the conversations you have with other people, and you’ll discover that there are no real boundaries between science and philosophy – or between those disciplines and any other that attempts to make valid claims about the world on the basis of evidence and logic. When such claims and their methods of verification admit of experiment and/or mathematical description, we tend to say our concerns are “scientific”; when they relate to matters more abstract, or to the consistency of our thinking itself, we often say we’re being “philosophical”; when we merely want to know how people behaved in the past, we dub our interests “historical” or “journalistic”; and when a person’s commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he’s being “religious.”
The boundaries between true intellectual disciplines are currently enforced by little more than university budgets and architecture... The real distinction we should care about – the observation of which is thesine qua non of the scientific attitude – is between demanding good reasons for what one believes and being satisfied with bad ones.
In a sentiment that calls to mind both Richard Feynman's spectacular ode to a flower and Carl Sagan's enduring wisdom on our search for meaning, Harris applies this model of knowledge to one of the great mysteries of science and philosophy – consciousness:
Even if one thinks the human mind is entirely the product of physics, the reality of consciousness becomes no less wondrous, and the difference between happiness and suffering no less important. Nor does such a view suggest that we’ll ever find the emergence of mind from matter fully intelligible; consciousness may always seem like a miracle. In philosophical circles, this is known as “the hard problem of consciousness” – some of us agree that this problem exists, some of us don’t. Should consciousness prove conceptually irreducible, remaining the mysterious ground for all we can conceivably experience or value, the rest of the scientific worldview would remain perfectly intact.
The remedy for all this confusion is simple: We must abandon the idea that science is distinct from the rest of human rationality. When you are adhering to the highest standards of logic and evidence, you are thinking scientifically. And when you’re not, you’re not.
In a related grievance, social psychologistBruce Hood – author of the uncomfortable yet strangely comforting The Self Illusion – does away with the notion of the self. Half a century after Alan Watts enlisted Eastern philosophy in this mission, Hood presents a necessary integration of science and philosophy:
It seems almost redundant to call for the retirement of the free willing self, as the idea is neither scientific nor is this the first time the concept has been dismissed for lack of empirical support. The self did not have to be discovered; it’s the default assumption most of us experience, so it wasn’t really revealed by methods of scientific inquiry.
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Yet the self, like a conceptual zombie, refuses to die. It crops up again and again in recent theories of decision making, as an entity with free will which can be depleted. It reappears as an interpreter in cognitive neuroscience, as able to integrate parallel streams of information arising from separable neural substrates. Even if these appearances of the self are understood to be convenient ways of discussing the emergent output of multiple parallel processes, students of the mind continue to implicitly endorse the idea that there’s a decision maker, an experiencer, a point of origin.
We know the self is constructed because it can be so easily deconstructed – through damage, disease, and drugs. It must be an emergent property of a parallel system processing input, output, and internal representations. It’s an illusion because it feels so real, but that experience is not what it seems. The same is true for free will. Although we can experience the mental anguish of making a decision... the choices and decisions we make are based on situations that impose on us. We don’t have the free will to choose the experiences that have shaped our decisions.
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By abandoning the free willing self, we’re forced to reexamine the factors that are truly behind our thoughts and behavior and the way they interact, balance, override, and cancel out. Only then will we begin to make progress in understanding how we really operate.
Among the most provocative answers, in fact, is one examining the factors that underlie one of the most complex and seemingly human of our experiences: love. Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studies the brain on love, points to romantic love and addiction as two concepts in need of serious reformulation and reframing – one best accomplished by understanding the intersection of the two. Fisher argues that we ought to broaden the definition of addiction and do away with science's staunch notion that all addiction is harmful. Love, she argues with a wealth of neurobiological evidence in hand, is in fact a state that closely resembles that of addiction in terms of what happens in the brain during it – and yet love, anguishing as it may be at times, is universally recognized as the height of positive experience. In that respect, it presents a case of "positiveaddiction." Fisher writes:
Love-besotted men and women show all the basic symptoms of addiction. Foremost, the lover is stiletto-focused on his/her drug of choice, the love object. The lover thinks obsessively about him or her (intrusive thinking), and often compulsively calls, writes, or stays in touch. Paramount in this experience is intense motivation to win one’s sweetheart, not unlike the substance abuser fixated on the drug. Impassioned lovers distort reality, change their priorities and daily habits to accommodate the beloved, experience personality changes (affect disturbance), and sometimes do inappropriate or risky things to impress this special other. Many are willing to sacrifice, even die for, “him” or “her.” The lover craves emotional and physical union with the beloved (dependence). And like addicts who suffer when they can’t get their drug, the lover suffers when apart from the beloved (separation anxiety). Adversity and social barriers even heighten this longing (frustration attraction).
In fact, besotted lovers express all four of the basic traits of addiction: craving, tolerance, withdrawal, and relapse. They feel a “rush” of exhilaration when they’re with their beloved (intoxication). As their tolerance builds, they seek to interact with the beloved more and more (intensification). If the love object breaks off the relationship, the lover experiences signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, insomnia or hypersomnia, loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability, and loneliness. Lovers, like addicts, also often go to extremes, sometimes doing degrading or physically dangerous things to win back the beloved. And lovers relapse the way drug addicts do. Long after the relationship is over, events, people, places, songs, or other external cues associated with their abandoning sweetheart can trigger memories and renewed craving.
Fisher points to fMRI studies that have shown intense romantic love to trigger the brain's reward system and the dopamine pathways responsible for "energy, focus, motivation, ecstasy, despair, and craving," as well as the brain regions most closely associated with addiction and substance abuse. In shedding light on the neurochemical machinery of romantic love, Fisher argues, science reveals it to be a "profoundly powerful, natural, often positive addiction."
Science writer Amanda Gefter takes issue with one particular manifestation of our propensity for oversimplification – the notion of the universe. She writes:
Physics has a time-honored tradition of laughing in the face of our most basic intuitions. Einstein’s relativity forced us to retire our notions of absolute space and time, while quantum mechanics forced us to retire our notions of pretty much everything else. Still, one stubborn idea has stood steadfast through it all: the universe.
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In recent years, however, the concept of a single shared spacetime has sent physics spiraling into paradox. The first sign that something was amiss came from Stephen Hawking’s landmark work in the 1970s showing that black holes radiate and evaporate, disappearing from the universe and purportedly taking some quantum information with them. Quantum mechanics, however, is predicated upon the principle that information can never be lost.
Gefter points to recent breakthroughs in physics that produced one particularly puzzling such paradox, known as the "firewall paradox," solved by the idea that spacetime is divided not by horizons but by the reference frames of the observers, "as if each observer had his or her own universe."
But the solution isn't a multiverse theory:
Yes, there are multiple observers, and yes, any observer’s universe is as good as any other’s. But if you want to stay on the right side of the laws of physics, you can talk only about one at a time. Which means, really, that only one exists at a time. It’s cosmic solipsism.
Ceramic tile by Debbie Millman courtesy of the artist
Here, psychology, philosophy, and cosmology converge, for what such theories suggest is what we already know about the human psyche – as I've put it elsewhere,the stories that we tell ourselves, whether they be false or true, are always real. Gefter concludes:
Adjusting our intuitions and adapting to the strange truths uncovered by physics is never easy. But we may just have to come around to the notion that there’s my universe and there’s your universe – but there’s no such thing as the universe.
Psychologist Jonathan Gottschall, who has previously explored why storytelling is so central to the human experience, argues against the notion that there can be no science of art. With an eye to our civilization's long struggle to define art, he writes:
We don’t even have a good definition, in truth, for what art is. In short, there’s nothing so central to human life that’s so incompletely understood.
Granted, Gottschall is only partly right, for there are some excellent definitions of art – take, for instance, Jeanette Winterson's orLeo Tolstoy's – but the fact that they don't come from scientists only speaks to his larger point. He argues that rather than being unfit to shed light on the role of art in human life, science simply hasn't applied itself to the problem adequately:
Scientific work in the humanities has mainly been scattered, preliminary, and desultory. It doesn’t constitute a research program.
If we want better answers to fundamental questions about art, science must jump into the game with both feet. Going it alone, humanities scholars can tell intriguing stories about the origins and significance of art, but they don’t have the tools to patiently winnow the field of competing ideas. That’s what the scientific method is for – separating the more accurate stories from the less accurate stories. But a strong science of art will require both the thick, granular expertise of humanities scholars and the clever hypothesis-testing of scientists. I’m not calling for a scientific takeover of the arts, I’m calling for a partnership.
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The Delphic admonition “Know thyself” still rings out as the great prime directive of intellectual inquiry, and there will always be a gaping hole in human self-knowledge until we...
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 "Bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt," Charles Bukowski lamented in an interview. Self-doubt is a familiar state for all who put pieces of their inner lives into the outside world – that is, for all artists."Determination allows for doubt and for humility – both of which are critical," Anna Deavere Smith counseled in her indispensable Letters to a Young Artist. And yet, integral as it may be to the creative experience by offering an antidote to the arrogance that produces most mediocre art, self-doubt isn't something we readily or heartily embrace. Instead, we run from it, we judge it, and we hedge against it using a range of coping mechanisms, many of which backfire into self-loathing. "Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt," Zadie Smith advised in her ten rules of writing.
But hardly anyone has captured this exasperating dance with self-doubt – which is part of the artist's universal and necessary dance with fear – better thanVirginia Woolf, she of enduring wisdom oncreativity and consciousness and the challenge of writing about the soul.
In Orlando: A Biography (public library) – her subversive 1928 novel, regarded as“the longest and most charming love letter in literature" – Woolf captures the anguishing self-doubt with which all artists tussle along the creative process, rendering in spectacular relief the particular granularity familiar to writers:
Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
Complement with Woolf on how to read a book, the creative benefits of keeping a diary, and the only surviving recording of her voice, then revisit this evolving library ofgreat writers' wisdom on writing.
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 “Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others,” Alan Watts wrote in his exquisite 1950s meditation on becoming who you are. But as is the case with life's most enduring perplexities, this wisdom was best delivered three decades earlier, not by a philosopher but by a children's book author."Real isn't how you are made... It's a thing that happens to you," Margery Williams wrote in 1922 in what would become one of the most beloved children's books of all time, part of the canon that contains such masterworks as The Little Prince, Winnie the Pooh, and Where the Wild Things Are.
This quiet aliveness of truth and tenderness is what Japanese illustrator Komako Sakaibrings to a bewitching and unusual adaptation of The Velveteen Rabbit (public library) nearly a century later – the loveliest take on the Williams classic since Maurice Sendak's little-known 1960 illustrations.
Timeless as the book may be, it is also one of extraordinary timeliness today – a story that speaks to our deepest anxieties about the effects of technological progress on our humanity.
A soft stuffed rabbit is given to a little boy at Christmas, enjoyed for a fleeting moment, then quickly ignored in favor of other gifts far more modern and mechanical – wind-up toys that move like the real-life objects they miniaturize.
And yet when the wise old Skin Horse – the oldest toy in the nursery – assures the rabbit that toys are made real by children's love, and the rabbit is emboldened by this notion despite feeling at a grave disadvantage compared to the modern toys, we too are reminded that however the cultural odds are stacked, our imperfect humanity is not merely the thing that makes life livable but the only thing that makes it worth living.
After the little boy's Nana gives him the humble toy one restless night, the Velveteen Rabbit grows to be his most beloved companion.
They become inseparable – the boy even brings his soft friend into the woods behind the house, where one day the Velveteen Rabbit meets a pair of wild rabbits. Perplexed by his stiffness, they tease him about not being "Real" – he can't even hop! – but although the taunting hurts him, the Velveteen Rabbit takes comfort in knowing that the little boy thinks he is Real, and loves him, and that's realness enough.
Ever so gently, another subtle and profound undercurrent emerges – the finitude of childhood and the impermanence of life itself.
When the boy falls ill, the Velveteen Rabbit is by his side as doctors and parents hover anxiously. And when the boy recovers, the doctor instructs the boy's mother to burn all of his belongings – books, toys, and especially that bedraggled stuffed rabbit – that may have been infected during his illness.
As the Velveteen Rabbit awaits his heartbreaking fate in a sack at the end of the garden, drowned in wistful reminiscence about all the joyful moments he and the little boy shared over the years, one very real tear rolls down his cheek and drops to the ground.
Why should it all end like this for someone who had been loved so much and become Real?
And then something magical happens – a flower emerges from the ground where the tear had fallen, and it blossoms to reveal the beautiful nursery fairy, who takes care of the most beloved toys after their children outgrow them.
With one kiss on the nose, the fairy transforms the Velveteen Rabbit into a Real rabbit – real not only to the boy who loved him, but real to the world, to all who judge the realness of others.
The seasons turn and when spring arrives again, the little boy treks back into the woods, where he has a strange and wonderful encounter with a wild rabbit that looks remarkably like his beloved lost toy. The rabbit looks at the boy, and the boy at the rabbit, they are elevated in a quiet moment of recognition – the mutual beholding of another's realness of which all love is made.
Sakai's take on The Velveteen Rabbitcomes from Brooklyn-based independent powerhouse Enchanted Lion, maker of some of the most intelligent and imaginative children's books of our time – including such endlessly rewarding treasures as The Lion and the Bird, The River, Little Boy Brown, Mister Horizontal & Miss Vertical,The Jacket, and Wednesday.
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"I would like to tell you every thing that happened to me since the last time we saw each other, but most of them are sad and you mustn’t know sad things now."
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"Fear of the unexplainable has not only impoverished our inner lives, but also diminished relations between people."
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"Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down."
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"We need reminders to be good, places to reawaken awe, something to reawaken our kinder, less selfish impulses..."
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"It is quite natural that people who really have something particular about them should be different from each other on the outside as well as on the inside."
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"The public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth."
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Chicken hash for Patti Smith, parsley salad for forty guests, and other edible fragments of a life that feminized the literary myth.
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From Maurice Sendak to the real-life story of a gay penguin family, by way of grandmothers and kings.
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"While the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done."
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"There's no use in comparing one's feelings between one day and the next; you must allow a reasonable interval, for the direction of change to show itself."
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Visionary interactive storytelling designed to "delight and surprise," with human tragedy on the side.
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