 Hello, Kwonki Lee! If you missed last week's edition – a remarkable "children's book for adults" about the art of openhearted living, Virginia Woolf on self-doubt, a Japanese artist's uncommonly tender take on The Velveteen Rabbit, some of the world's greatest thinkers each select a major misconception holding us back, 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.
 In her 1984 novel The Lover, Marguerite Duras wrote that "the art of seeing has to be learned." It is a sentiment at once poetic and practical – cognitive science now knows that our brains invest a great deal of resources in learning to unsee and tune out irrelevant stimuli, which is why "when you look closely at anything familiar, it transmogrifies into something unfamiliar."
Anything that can be learned can be taught, and there is hardly a greater teacher in the art of seeing than Annie Dillard – an astute and lyrical observer of the world, both inner and outer, and a supreme enchantress of aliveness. Her 1974 masterpiece Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (public library) is one of those rare treasures best described as secular scripture, partway between Thoreau and Mary Oliver. In this gift of a book, Dillard explores seeing as an act of love ("The lover can see, and the knowledgeable," she writes in one of her bestirring asides), but also as a monumental task for which we are chronically and profoundly underequipped ("My eyes account for less than one percent of the weight of my head," she observes with sweet resignation; "I’m bony and dense; I see what I expect.").
Illustration by Alessandro Sanna from The River
Dillard writes:
 We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence… “Seem like we’re just set down here,” a woman said to me recently, “and don’t nobody know why.”
[...]
I live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks ... are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.
Indeed, this uncertainty of vision is necessary if we are to befriend the mystery we call life – for the wider a view we take in observing that mystery, the more space for uncertainty there is. Dillard explores this with enormous wisdom and grace in another passage, using the word "we" with the perhaps intentional ambiguity of connoting both the universality of all human beings and the subset of humans who call ourselves writers. (For, lest we forget, "a writer is a professional observer.") She reflects:
We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
The darkness, indeed, suits us – too much illumination can be paralyzing. (This happened quite literally when electric light was first introduced, but it is also part of our spiritual pathology as we spend much of our lives almost completely opaque to ourselves.) Citing one of Van Gogh's stirring letters to his brother – "Still,” he wrote, “a great deal of light falls on everything.” – Dillard reflects on the counterpoints that define our existence:
If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results.
Dillard illustrates this in the most visceral of ways imaginable. Referencing a wonderful and wonderfully obscure 1960 book calledSpace and Light by a surgeon named Marius von Senden, she relays the numerous case studies of the first generation of patients on whom safe cataract surgeries were performed, and the extraordinary ways in which the restoration of vision – especially for those who had been unseeing since birth – fully disoriented people's sense perceptions and ideas of space.
The notion of shadow and light was particularly incomprehensible, for shadow is evidence of depth and dimension – something the patients had never experienced and thus something that made no sense at all, that presented them with "the world unraveled from reason." The newly sighted were suddenly so overwhelmed by the world of light, form, and space that many retreated into their old ways of navigation and sensemaking, choosing to keep their eyes shut and to orient themselves via their familiar senses.
This, of course, is a metaphor at once incredibly elegant and incredibly jarring for how we all react to overwhelming new knowledge – especially knowledge about ourselves and ourselves in relation to our formerly familiar surroundings, our suddenly confusing inner world in relation to the suddenly nonsensical outer. It produces, in the words of one doctor Dillard cites, “the rapid and complete loss of that striking and wonderful serenity which is characteristic only of those who have never yet seen.” She writes:
The mental effort involved in these reasonings proves overwhelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable. It oppresses them to realize that they have been visible to people all along, perhaps unattractively so, without their knowledge or consent. A disheartening number of them refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing into apathy and despair.
And yet there is a light – a gloriously breathtaking light – at the end of that tunnel of confusion, as much for the patients as for our spiritual blindnesses. Quoting another physician's clinical case, Dillard captures this beautifully:
A twenty-two-year-old girl was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but, “the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful!'"
Dillard returns to the elusive art of seeing in our everyday lives. In a sentiment that calls to mind what cognitive scientists now know about attention and Mary Oliver's piercing assertion that "attention without feeling is only a report," she considers the two ways of seeing:
Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.
[...]
If Tinker Mountain erupted, I’d be likely to notice. But if I want to notice the lesser cataclysms of valley life, I have to maintain in my head a running description of the present... Like a blind man at the ball game, I need a radio.
When I see this way I analyze and pry. I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head. Some days when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall.
But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.
Indeed, the "aesthetic consumerism" of which Susan Sontag accused photography easily befalls the mind's eye as well, if we aren't careful. But when we allow ourselves this letting go, when we let shadow and light permeate our willful blindness, the warmth of illumination washes over us and leaves us transformed. "Something broke and something opened," Dillard writes of one such transcendent moment in which she let herself experience this second kind of seeing. And something must always break in order for something to open within us – especially when it comes to seeing our interior worlds in their full dimensionality. Dillard writes:
When I see this way I see truly. As Thoreau says, I return to my senses. I am the man who watches the baseball game in silence in an empty stadium. I see the game purely; I’m abstracted and dazed. When it’s all over and the white-suited players lope off the green field to their shadowed dugouts, I leap to my feet; I cheer and cheer.
But I can’t go out and try to see this way. I’ll fail, I’ll go mad. All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes. The effort is really a discipline requiring a lifetime of dedicated struggle; it marks the literature of saints and monks of every order East and West, under every rule and no rule, discalced and shod. The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.
What John Steinbeck advised his teenage son about the secret of falling in love Dillard parallels in her counsel on the secret of seeing:
The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all. But although the pearl may be found, it may not be sought. The literature of illumination reveals this above all: although it comes to those who wait for it, it is always, even to the most practiced and adept, a gift and a total surprise... I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is an infinitely enlightening read in its totality, itself belonging to this canon of "the literature of illumination." Complement it with Dillard on the life of sensation versus the life of presence, her enduring advice on writing, and an illuminating conversation with cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz on learning to see the everyday wonderland of life, then revisit astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser on how to live with mystery in the age of knowledge.
:: MORE / SHARE ::
–––
 Franz Kafka was one of history's most prolific and expressive practitioners of what Virginia Woolf called "the humane art."Among the hundreds of epistles he penned during his short life were his beautiful and heartbreaking love letters and his magnificent missive to a childhood friend about what books do for the human soul. Although he imbued most with an extraordinary depth of introspective insight and self-revelation, none surpass the 47-page letter he wrote to his father, Hermann, in November of 1919 – the closest thing to an autobiography Kafka ever produced. A translation by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins was posthumously published as Letter to His Father (public library) in 1966.
Prompted in large part by the dissolution of his engagement to Felice Bauer, in which Hermann's active disapproval of the relationship was a toxic force and which resulted in the estrangement of father and son, 36-year-old Kafka set out to hold his father accountable for the emotional abuse, disorienting double standards, and constant disapprobation that branded his childhood – a measured yet fierce outburst of anguish and disappointment thirty years in the buildup.
His litany of indictments is doubly harrowing in light of what psychologists have found in the decades since – that our early limbic contact with our parents profoundly shapes our character, laying down the wiring for emotional habits and patterns of connecting that greatly influence what we bring to all subsequent relationships in life, either expanding or contracting our capacity for "positivity resonance"depending on how nurturing or toxic those formative relationships were. For those of us with similar experiences, be it inflicted by a patriarch or a matriarch, Kafka's letter to his father is at once excruciating in its deep resonance and strangely comforting in its validation of shared reality.
Kafka writes:
Dearest Father, You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.
The first page of Kafka's letter to his father
Kafka paints the backdrop of his father's emotional tyranny and lays out what he hopes the letter would accomplish for both of them:
To you the matter always seemed very simple, at least in so far as you talked about it in front of me, and indiscriminately in front of many other people. It looked to you more or less as follows: you have worked hard all your life, have sacrificed everything for your children, above all for me, consequently I have lived high and handsome, have been completely at liberty to learn whatever I wanted, and have had no cause for material worries, which means worries of any kind at all. You have not expected any gratitude for this, knowing what “children’s gratitude” is like, but have expected at least some sort of obligingness, some sign of sympathy. Instead I have always hidden from you, in my room, among my books, with crazy friends, or with extravagant ideas... If you sum up your judgment of me, the result you get is that, although you don’t charge me with anything downright improper or wicked (with the exception perhaps of my latest marriage plan), you do charge me with coldness, estrangement, and ingratitude. And, what is more, you charge me with it in such a way as to make it seem my fault, as though I might have been able, with something like a touch on the steering wheel, to make everything quite different, while you aren’t in the slightest to blame, unless it be for having been too good to me.
This, your usual way of representing it, I regard as accurate only in so far as I too believe you are entirely blameless in the matter of our estrangement. But I am equally entirely blameless. If I could get you to acknowledge this, then what would be possible is – not, I think, a new life, we are both much too old for that – but still, a kind of peace; no cessation, but still, a diminution of your unceasing reproaches.
But this is where the similarity ends. Kafka sees in his father everything he himself is not – a man of "health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, knowledge of human nature, a certain way of doing things on a grand scale, of course also with all the defects and weaknesses that go with these advantages and into which your temperament and sometimes your hot temper drive you." The anguish resulting from this disparity of temperaments coupled with a disparity of power between parent and child is familiar to all who have lived through a similar childhood – the constantly enforced, with varying degrees of force, sense that the parent's version of reality is always right simply by virtue of authority and the child's always wrong by virtue of submission, and thus the child comes to internalize the chronic guilt of wrongness.
With such a child's classic cycle of accusation and apologism in making sense of a parent's hurtful behavior, Kafka considers his father's shortcomings with equal parts pain and compassion:
We were so different and in our difference so dangerous to each other that if anyone had tried to calculate in advance how I, the slowly developing child, and you, the full-grown man, would stand to each other, he could have assumed that you would simply trample me underfoot so that nothing was left of me. Well, that did not happen. Nothing alive can be calculated. But perhaps something worse happened. And in saying this I would all the time beg of you not to forget that I never, and not even for a single moment, believe any guilt to be on your side. The effect you had on me was the effect you could not help having. But you should stop considering it some particular malice on my part that I succumbed to that effect.
I was a timid child. For all that, I am sure I was also obstinate, as children are. I am sure that Mother spoilt me too, but I cannot believe I was particularly difficult to manage; I cannot believe that a kindly word, a quiet taking by the hand, a friendly look, could not have got me to do anything that was wanted of me. Now you are, after all, at bottom a kindly and softhearted person (what follows will not be in contradiction to this, I am speaking only of the impression you made on the child), but not every child has the endurance and fearlessness to go on searching until it comes to the kindliness that lies beneath the surface. You can only treat a child in the way you yourself are constituted, with vigor, noise, and hot temper, and in this case this seemed to you, into the bargain, extremely suitable, because you wanted to bring me up to be a strong brave boy.
In a poignant lament that calls to mind the contrasting childhood of Henri Matisse, who was bathed in parental support, Kafka bemoans his father's attitude toward his academic and creative endeavors:
What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little friendliness, a little keeping open of my road, instead of which you blocked it for me, though of course with the good intention of making me go another road. But I was not fit for that... At that time, and at that time in every way, I would have needed encouragement.
In reflecting on his father's particularly oppressive "intellectual domination," Kafka speaks to the particular burden of children whose parents have risen from poverty to success by their own efforts. (In factuality, Hermann grew up in a middle-class family but liked to mythologize the hardships of his youth after he became a successful businessman.) With piercing insight into the self-righteousness syndrome that befalls many such self-made people who come to believe their own myth of omnipotence, Kafka writes:
You had worked your way so far up by your own energies alone, and as a result you had unbounded confidence in your opinion. That was not yet so dazzling for me as a child as later for the boy growing up. From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meshugge, not normal. Your self-confidence indeed was so great that you had no need to be consistent at all and yet never ceased to be in the right. It did sometimes happen that you had no opinion whatsoever about a matter and as a result all opinions that were at all possible with respect to the matter were necessarily wrong, without exception. You were capable, for instance, of running down the Czechs, and then the Germans, and then the Jews, and what is more, not only selectively but in every respect, and finally nobody was left except yourself. For me you took on the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have whose rights are based on their person and not on reason.
Once again, Kafka returns to how his father's warped and solipsistic view of reality made his own bleed with uncertainty and self-doubt:
All these thoughts, seemingly independent of you, were from the beginning burdened with your belittling judgments; it was almost impossible to endure this and still work out a thought with any measure of completeness and permanence.
Writing only five years after Freud introduced the concept of narcissism and half a century before Narcissistic Personality Disorder came to be classified in psychiatry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Kafka offers a perfect and prescient diagnosis of his father:
What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgments. It was as though you had no notion of your power. I too, I am sure, often hurt you with what I said, but then I always knew, and it pained me, but I could not control myself, could not keep the words back, I was sorry even while I was saying them. But you struck out with your words without much ado, you weren’t sorry for anyone, either during or afterwards, one was utterly defenseless against you.
Anyone who has shared life with a narcissist recognizes, of course, the chronic dispensation of such double standards and its many manifestations across all areas where rules are applied. In describing how Hermann disciplined his children at the dinner table, Kafka illustrates this narcissistic tendency with the perfect allegorical anecdote:
The main thing was that the bread should be cut straight. But it didn’t matter that you did it with a knife dripping with gravy. Care had to be taken that no scraps fell on the floor. In the end it was under your chair that there were most scraps.
The most heartbreaking effect of these disorienting double standards is that the child grows utterly confused about right and wrong, for they seem to trade places constantly depending on who the doer is, and comes to internalize the notion that he or she is always at fault. Instead of holding up a mirror to validate the child's experience of reality, such a parent instead traps the child in a fun-house maze of mirrors that never reflect an accurate or static image. Those who have lived through this know how easily it metastasizes into a deep-seated belief that one's interpretation of reality, especially when reality is ambiguous or uncertain, is always the wrong one, the faulty one, the one fully invalidated by the mere existence of another's interpretation.
Illustration from My First Kafka by Matthue Roth, a children's-book adaptation of Kafka for kids
Since there was nothing at all I was certain of, since I needed to be provided at every instant with a new confirmation of my existence, since nothing was in my very own, undoubted, sole possession, determined unequivocally only by me – in sober truth a disinherited son – naturally I became unsure even of the thing nearest to me, my own body.
This paved the way for "every sort of hypochondria" and developed a wide range of anxieties about "digestion, hair falling out, a spinal curvature, and so on," which swelled into tormenting fixations until he finally succumbed to real illness – the tuberculosis that would eventually take his life.
Kafka turns to how his father's explosive temperament crushed the young man's hope of being understood – which is what everybody needs – by annihilating the possibility of calm, civil conversation in the household:
[Your] frightful, hoarse undertone of anger and utter condemnation ... only makes me tremble less today than in my childhood because the child’s exclusive sense of guilt has been partly replaced by insight into our helplessness, yours and mine.
The impossibility of getting on calmly together had one more result, actually a very natural one: I lost the capacity to talk. I dare say I would not have become a very eloquent person in any case, but I would, after all, have acquired the usual fluency of human language. But at a very early stage you forbade me to speak. Your threat, “Not a word of contradiction!” and the raised hand that accompanied it have been with me ever since. What I got from you – and you are, whenever it is a matter of your own affairs, an excellent talker – was a hesitant, stammering mode of speech, and even that was still too much for you, and finally I kept silent, at first perhaps out of defiance, and then because I could neither think nor speak in your presence. And because you were the person who really brought me up, this has had its repercussions throughout my life.
[...]
Your extremely effective rhetorical methods in bringing me up, which never failed to work with me, were: abuse, threats, irony, spiteful laughter, and – oddly enough – self-pity.
This blend of abusive aplomb and martyrdom seems common in the narcissistic tyrant – familiar, at least, to those who have suffered one – but Kafka adds even more dimension by pointing out that his father's most scarring abuse was inflicted less by direct blows than by toxic osmosis, that soul-squashing effect of being in the presence of an angry and spiritually draining despot:
I cannot recall your ever having abused me directly and in downright abusive terms. Nor was that necessary; you had so many other methods, and besides, in talk at home and particularly at business the words of abuse went flying around me in such swarms, as they were flung at other people’s heads, that as a little boy I was sometimes almost stunned and had no reason not to apply them to myself too, for the people you were abusing were certainly no worse than I was and you were certainly not more displeased with them than with me. And here again was your enigmatic innocence and inviolability; you cursed and swore without the slightest scruple; yet you condemned cursing and swearing in other people and would not have it.
His father's continuous threats, Kafka argues, were in a way more painful than the actual harm they promised but rarely delivered. "One’s feelings became dulled by these continued threats," he laments, but more than that, they conditioned the twisted sense that his father's choice not to administer the promised punishment was some great act of generosity:
One had, so it seemed to the child, remained alive through your mercy and bore one’s life henceforth as an undeserved gift from you.
[...]
It is also true that you hardly ever really gave me a whipping. But the shouting, the way your face got red, the hasty undoing of the braces and laying them ready over the back of the chair, all that was almost worse for me. It is as if someone is going to be hanged. If he really is hanged, then he is dead and it is all over. But if he has to go through all the preliminaries to being hanged and he learns of his reprieve only when the noose is dangling before his face, he may suffer from it all his life. Besides, from the many occasions on which I had, according to your clearly expressed opinion, deserved a whipping but was let off at the last moment by your grace, I again accumulated only a huge sense of guilt. On every side I was to blame, I was in your debt.
Indeed, this touches on the most devastating and deadening effect of growing up in such an emotional environment – the way in which we come to mistake the crumbs of mercy for a feast of love. Kafka recounts those rare glimpses of basic parental care and affection, to which every abuser's child learns to cling as the...
:: READ FULL ARTICLE / SHARE ::
–––
 At 8PM on the last day of 1869, a little boy named Henri entered the world in a gray textile-mill town in the north of France, in a rundown two-room cottage with a leaky roof. He didn't have much materially, but he was blessed with perhaps the greatest gift a child could have – an unconditionally loving, relentlessly supportive mother. Like many creative icons whose destinies were shaped by the unflinching encouragement of loved ones, little Henri became the great Henri Matissethanks to his mother's staunch support, which began with an unusual ignition spark: At the age of twenty, Henri was hospitalized for appendicitis and his mother brought him a set of art supplies with which to occupy his recovery. "From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands," Matisse recounted, "I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” And that thing flowed from love, too – it was Matisse's mother who encouraged her son, like E.E. Cummings encouraged all aspiring artists, to disregard the formal rules of art and instead paint from the heart. "My mother loved everything I did," he asserted. Decades later, thanks to Gertrude Stein's patronage, which catalyzed his career and sparked his friendship with Picasso, the world too would come to love what Matisse did.
In The Iridescence of Birds: A Book About Henri Matisse (public library), writer Patricia MacLachlan and illustrator Hadley Hooper tell the heartening story of young Henri's childhood and how it shaped his artistic path long before he began painting – how his mother, in an attempt to brighten the drab and sunless days, put bright red rugs on the floors and painted colorful plates to hang on the walls, letting little Henri mix the paints; how his father gave him pigeons, whose iridescent plumage the boy observed with endless fascination; how the beautiful silks woven by the townspeople beguiled him with their bright patterns.
With a gentle sidewise gleam, the story offers a nuanced answer to the eternal nature-versus-nurture question of whether genius is born or made. Embedded in it is a wonderful testament to the idea thatattentive presence rather than praise is the key to great parenting, especially when it comes to nurturing young talent. (Indeed, such maternal presence is what legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom provided for many of the young authors and artists – including, most notably, Maurice Sendak – whom she nurtured over the course of her reign asthe twentieth century's greatest patron saint of children's books.)
For a delightful touch of empathy via a twist of perspective, MacLachlan places the reader in little Henri's shoes:
If you were a boy named Henri Matisse who lived in a dreary town in northern France where the skies were gray
And the days were cold
And you wanted color and light
And sun,
And your mother, to brighten your days,
Painted plates to hang on the walls
With pictures of meadows and trees,
Rivers and birds,
And she let you mix the colors of paint...
... And you raised Pigeons
Watching their sharp eyes
And red feet,
And their colors that changed with the light
As they moved...
... Would it be a surprise that you became
A fine painter who painted
Light
and
Movement
And the iridescence of birds?
Beneath the biographical particulars of the story itself is MacLachlan's larger inquiry into the enduring question of whether artists draw what they see or what they feel and remember – Matisse's life, she writes in the afterword, attests to the fact that the two are inextricably entwined:"He painted his feelings and he painted his childhood."
Hooper's illustrations are themselves a masterwork of artistry, scholarship, and creative ingenuity. She spent considerable time studying Matisse's sensibility and colors in reproductions of his drawings, cutouts, and paintings, then researched textile patterns from the era of his childhood and even used Google Maps to picture the actual streets that he walked as a little boy. The result is not imitation but dimensional celebration. Hooper reflects on the unusual and inventive technique she chose:
I decided to try relief printing, which forced me to simplify my shapes and allowed me to focus on the color and composition. I cut the characters and backgrounds out of stiff foam and cardboard, inked them up, made prints, and scanned the results into Photoshop. The approach felt right.
The Iridescence of Birds is absolutely wonderful, in a way to which the screen does a great injustice. Complement it with other excellent picture-book biographies of luminaries, including those of Jane Goodall, Henri Rousseau, Pablo Neruda, Julia Child, Albert Einstein, and Maria Merian.
:: MORE / SHARE ::
–––
 Many celebrated writers have championedthe creative benefits of keeping a diary, but no one has put the diary to more impressive practical use in the creative process than John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968). In the spring of 1938, shortly after performing one of the greatest acts of artistic courage – that of changing one's mind when a creative project is well underway, as Steinbeck did when he abandoned a bookhe felt wasn't living up to his humanistic duty – he embarked on the most intense writing experience of his life. The public fruit of this labor would become the 1939 masterwork The Grapes of Wrath – a title his politically radical wife, Carol Steinbeck, came up with after readingThe Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Howe. The novel earned Steinbeck the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and was a cornerstone for his Nobel Prize two decades later, but its private fruit is in many ways at least as important and morally instructive.
Alongside the novel, Steinbeck also began keeping a diary, eventually published as Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath(public library) – a remarkable living record of his creative journey, in which this extraordinary writer tussles with excruciating self-doubt (exactly the kind Virginia Woolf so memorably described) but plows forward anyway, with equal parts gusto and grist, driven by the dogged determination to do his best with the gift he has despite his limitations. His daily journaling becomes a practice both redemptive and transcendent.
Steinbeck had only two requests for the diary – that it wouldn't be made public in his lifetime, and that it should be made available to his two sons so they could “look behind the myth and hearsay and flattery and slander a disappeared man becomes and to know to some extent what manner of man their father was.” It stands, above all, as a supreme testament to the fact that the sole substance of genius is the daily act of showing up.
Steinbeck captures this perfectly in an entry that applies just as well to any field of creative endeavor:
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is no possibility, in me at least, of saying, “I’ll do it if I feel like it.” One never feels like awaking day after day. In fact, given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all. The rest is nonsense. Perhaps there are people who can work that way, but I cannot. I must get my words down every day whether they are any good or not.
The journal thus becomes at once a tool of self-discipline (he vowed to write in it every single weekday, and did, declaring in one of the first entries: "Work is the only good thing."), a pacing mechanism (he gave himself seven months to complete the book, anticipated it would actually take only 100 days, and finished it in under five months, averaging 2,000 words per day, longhand, not including the diary), and a sounding board for much-needed positive self-talk in the face of constant doubt ("I am so lazy and the thing ahead is so very difficult,"he despairs in one entry; but he assures himself in another: "My will is low. I must build my will again. And I can do it.") Above all, it is a tool of accountability to keep him moving forward despite life's litany of distractions and responsibilities. "Problems pile up so that this book moves like a Tide Pool snail with a shell and barnacles on its back," he writes, and yet the essential thing is that despite the problems, despite the barnacles, it does move. He captures this in one of his most poignant entries, shortly before completing the first half of the novel:
Every book seems the struggle of a whole life. And then, when it is don – pouf. Never happened. Best thing is to get the words down every day. And it is time to start now.
A few days later, he spirals into self-doubt again:
My many weaknesses are beginning to show their heads. I simply must get this thing out of my system. I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were. This success will ruin me as sure as hell. It probably won’t last, and that will be all right. I’ll try to go on with work now. Just a stint every day does it. I keep forgetting.
Indeed, upon starting the diary, Steinbeck is clear about its disciplining purpose and its role as a reminder this incremental daily progress, often slow and small, is precisely what produces the greater whole. In one of the first entries in early June, he writes:
This is the longest diary I ever kept. Not a diary of course but an attempt to map the actual working days and hours of a novel. If a day is skipped it will show glaringly on this record and there will be some reason given for the slip.
Steinbeck's commitment to discipline isn't mere moral vanity or fetishism of productivity – his is an earnest yearning to create the greatest work of his life, the height of what he as a conscious and creative human being is capable. In one of the early entries, he resolves:
This must be a good book. It simply must. I haven’t any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted – slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges. And I can do it. I feel very strong to do it.
But per Dani Shapiro's astute distinction between confidence and courage, this is a statement of the latter, the truer virtue – Steinbeck is well aware of everything that might derail his efforts, vexations both external and internal, and yet he decides to exert himself anyway, to be wholehearted about the endeavor despite a profound lack of confidence. Here is courage, alive and throbbing, from another of the early entries:
All sorts of things might happen in the course of this book but I must not be weak. This must be done. The failure of will even for one day has a devastating effect on the whole, far more important than just the loss of time and wordage. The whole physical basis of the novel is discipline of the writer, of his material, of the language. And sadly enough, if any of the discipline is gone, all of it suffers.
So single-minded is his sense of purpose that in one entry he declares:
Once this book is done I won’t care how soon I die, because my major work will be over.
And in another:
When I am all done I shall relax but not until then. My life isn’t very long and I must get one good book written before it ends.
Wall clock design by Debbie Millman. Details here.
But some days, his resolve barely overpowers his self-doubt:
If only I could do this book properly it would be one of the really fine books and a truly American book. But I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. I’ll just have to work from a background of these. Honesty. If I can keep an honesty it is all I can expect of my poor brain – never temper a word to a reader’s prejudice, but bend it like putty for his understanding.
And some, the self-doubt becomes completely overwhelming:
If I can do that it will be all my lack of genius can produce. For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time. Sometimes, I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done it slides into mediocrity.
On others, he is able to recognize the doubt but not buy into it:
For some reason I’m slightly skittish. That does not always mean anything. I’ll just take a running dive at it and set down what happens.
This, in a way, is the journal's most emboldening quality – it is almost a Buddhist scripture, decades before Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, as Steinbeck faces the ebb and flow of experience. He feels his feelings of doubt fully, lets them run through him, and yet maintains a higher awareness that they are just that: feelings, not Truth.
Still, most striking and yet most strangely assuring of all – especially to those also laboring in the seething cauldron of uncertainty that is creative work – is Steinbeck's chronic and acute case of Impostor Syndrome. Even though he had reached both critical and financial success with his earlier work, he seems not only mistrustful but even contemptuous of that success, seeing in it a source not of pride but of shame. In an early journal, he writes:
For the moment now the financial burdens have been removed. But it is not permanent. I was not made for success. I find myself now with a growing reputation. In many ways it is a terrible thing... Among other things I feel that I have put something over. That this little success of mine is cheating.
He is extremely harsh on himself, to a point of letting his suspicion of his own success swell into suspicion of his personal valor and the basic goodness of his character:
I must be sure to choose which is love and which sorryness. I’m not a very good person. Sometimes generous and good and kind and other times mean and short.
Like most artists, he repeatedly questions the validity of his art and his qualification for it:
Taylor [ Ed. – next-door neighbor] just rakes his yard and putters. But he would probably do a better job of this than I am doing. More ship-shape. I wish I were he sometimes. Just rake the yard and mix a little cement. How did I ever get started on this writing business anyway? To work.
Even as he nears completion of the novel – remember, one that would win a Pulitzer and earn Steinbeck the Nobel Prize – he still mistrusts its merit and his talent:
This book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy.
Shortly before beginning The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck captures in another journal the fake-it-till-you-make-it nature of self-salvation – of incredulously pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps despite a grave sense of insufficiency, of being a fraud about to be found out – and even...
:: READ FULL ARTICLE / SHARE ::
If you enjoyed this week's newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest donation. |
|
|
| |
I pour tons of time, thought, resources, and love into bringing you Brain Pickings, which remains free. 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: 
|
“If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones… After all, there are better ways to starve to death.”
|
A playful parable about the stories we tell to avoid being wrong and the combinatorial nature of human creativity.
|
"All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light."
|
The kind of book that reads you as you read it.
|
"I doubt I would have written a line ... unless some minor tragedy had sort of twisted my mind out of the normal rut."
|
"Direction is essential for the continuing existence of the crowd... A crowd exists so long as it has an unattained goal."
|
A sweet story starring a heroine partway between Eloise and Amelia Earhart.
|
"I am recycled cells, I learn to like myself more with each iteration..."
|
"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."
|
"Fear of the unexplainable has not only impoverished our inner lives, but also diminished relations between people."
|
"Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down."
|
"We need reminders to be good, places to reawaken awe, something to reawaken our kinder, less selfish impulses..."
|
"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."
|
"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."
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
|
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기