 Hello, Kwonki Lee! If you missed last week's edition – Annie Dillard on how to live with mystery and the two ways of seeing, Kafka's remarkable letter to his emotionally abusive father, how Steinbeck used the diary as a tool of discipline and a hedge against self-doubt, the sweet illustrated story of how Matisse's childhood shaped his creative legacy, 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.
 It was only at the very end of his long life that the great French author André Gide(November 22, 1869–February 19, 1951) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his "fearless love of truth and keen psychological insight." But the seed for it was planted in his youth – Gide was among the many celebrated authors who reaped the creative and spiritual benefits of keeping a diary. In one of his earliest journal entries, he wrote: "A diary is useful during conscious, intentional, and painful spiritual evolutions. Then you want to know where you stand... An intimate diary is interesting especially when it records the awakening of ideas."
That remarkable journey of awakening began shortly before his twentieth birthday and continued until his death. It was eventually published as The Journals of André Gide (public library) – a treasure trove of such "keen psychological insight" so rich and enduring that young Susan Sontag found in it "perfect intellectual communion" andextolled the virtues of its frequent rereading. Sontag was not alone – Gide's journal, while a private record of introspection, makes comprehensible and thus endurable the most elusive, complex, and difficult experiences common not only to writers, not only to all artists, but to the entire human family.
One of his most lucid and luminous such meditations deals with the paradox of sincerity, the difference between being and appearing, and the monumental question of what it really means to be oneself.
The week after his twentieth birthday, the same day he laid out hisrules of moral conduct, young Gide writes:
 Whenever I get ready again to write really sincere notes in this notebook, I shall have to undertake such a disentangling in my cluttered brain that, to stir up all that dust, I am waiting for a series of vast empty hours, a long cold, a convalescence, during which my constantly reawakened curiosities will lie at rest; during which my sole care will be to rediscover myself.
The conquest of sincerity would become a driving force in his life, both in his private and public writings, and twenty-year-old Gide lays its foundation under the heading RULE OF CONDUCT:
Pay no attention to appearing. Being is alone important.
And do not long, through vanity, for too hasty manifestation of one's essence.
Whence: do not seek to be through the vain desire toappear; but rather because it is fitting to be so.
He admonishes against the most perilous manifestation of mistaking appearing for being – imitation. Catching himself emulating Stendhal, young Gide cautions – himself and, by extension, all of us, for this is the great gift of his journal:
I must stop puffing up my pride (in this notebook) just for the sake of doing as Stendhal did. The spirit of imitation; watch out for it. It is useless to do something simply because another man has done it. One must remember the rule of conduct of the great after having isolated it from the contingent facts of their lives, rather than imitating the little facts.
Dare to be yourself. I must underline that in my head too.
Don't ever do anything through affectation or to make people like you or through imitation or for the pleasure of contradicting.
By the following summer, he is further consumed with this elusive subject of inhabiting one's self. In an entry from August of 1891, he writes:
My mind was quibbling just now as to whether one must first be before appearing or first appear and then be what one appears. (Like the people who first buy on credit and later worry about their debt; appearing before being amounts to getting in debt toward the physical world.)
Perhaps, my mind said, we are only in so far as weappear.
Moreover the two propositions are false when separated:
- We are for the sake of appearing.
- We appear because we are.
The two must be joined in a mutual dependence. Then you get the desired imperative. One must be to appear.
The appearing must not be distinguished from the being; the being asserts itself in the appearing; the appearing is the immediate manifestation of the being.
By December, the 21-year-old writer has grown particularly concerned with the importance and difficulty of sincerity in creative work. (This paradox is something artist Carroll Dunham would capture beautifully more than a century later, in observing that "you have to make art to bean artist, but you have to be an artist to make art." In her own magnificent journal, artist Anne Truitt also contemplated the difference between doing art and being an artist.) Gide writes:
When one has begun to write, the hardest thing is to be sincere. Essential to mull over that idea and to define artistic sincerity. Meanwhile, I hit upon this: the word must never precede the idea. Or else: the word must always be necessitated by the idea. It must be irresistible and inevitable; and the same is true of the sentence, of the whole work of art. And for the artist's whole life, since his vocation must be irresistible...
Noting that the fear of being insincere has been "tormenting" him for several months and preventing him from writing, he sighs:
Oh, to be utterly and perfectly sincere...
Two weeks later, he returns to the subject with renewed marvel at its paradoxical nature and considers the "reverse sincerity" of the artist:
Rather than recounting his life as he has lived it, [the artist] must live his life as he will recount it. In other words, the portrait of him formed by his life must identify itself with the ideal portrait he desires. And, in still simpler terms, he must be as he wishes to be.
I am torn by a conflict between the rules of morality and the rules of sincerity.
Morality consists in substituting for the natural creature (the old Adam) a fiction that you prefer. But then you are no longer sincere. The old Adam is the sincere man.
This occurs to me: the old Adam is the poet. The new man, whom you prefer, is the artist. The artist must take the place of the poet. From the struggle between the two is born the work of art.
The Journals of André Gide is a remarkable and timelessly rewarding read in its entirety, on par with such rare masterworks as Thoreau's journals and Rilke's letters – the kind that lodges itself in the soul and remains there a lifetime. Complement this particular sliver with pioneering artist and female entrepreneur Wanda Gág on the two selves and young Tolstoy's diaristic search of selfhood.
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 "Home," Maya Angelou wrote in her magnificent meditation on belonging and (not) growing up, "is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant." Indeed, it seems that only for children, with their purity of feeling and their ability to "mediate the ideal and the real," does the Venn diagram of home and house integrate into one fully overlapping circle. In adulthood, the circles drift further and further apart as we begin to project our conflicted dream-home ideals onto our real houses.
In the impossibly wonderful Home (public library), illustrator and children's book author Carson Ellis presents an imaginative taxonomy of houses and a celebration of the wildly different kinds of people who call them home.
What emerges is a playful and tender reminder that however different our walks of life – what contrast there is between the Slovakian duchess's mansion and the Kenyan blacksmith's shack, between the babushka's kitchen and the artist's studio! – we are united by our deep desire for a place to call home.
After all, we begin belonging to his world – to borrow Mary Oliver's wonderful phrase – first by rooting ourselves into it; by staking out a little corner of it to call our very own. It need not have walls or a roof – it can be a tour bus, or even a shoe, as Ellis's illustrated taxonomy assures – but only from that place of safety can we reach out to connect, to understand one another, and to begin belonging together.
Ellis guides the reader to and through this common thread of belonging by placing little semi-hidden markers of communion and continuity – the same house plant graces multiple homes; a pigeon visits the young girl in Brooklyn and then perches on the Russian babushka's window; the icon that hangs on the wall of the babushka's kitchen is seen, several pages later, on the wall of the artist's studio. (The artist, endearingly enough, is Ellis herself.)
Sprinkled amid the very real homes of very real people from different cultures are the whimsical abodes familiar from beloved tales – right next to the Japanese businessman is the Norse god, proudly standing before his magical palace, and a giant upside-down cup calls to mindLeonard Weisgard's magnificent mid-century illustrations for Alice in Wonderland.
Home is the kind of book that legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom, perhaps the greatest patron saint of childhood who ever lived, might say "can’t help but make any child warmed and attended to and considered." Complement it with the best children's books of the past year.
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 The equilibrium between productivity and presence is one of the hardest things to master in life, and one of the most important. We, both as a culture and as individuals, often conflate it with the deceptively similar-sounding yet profoundly different notion of "work/life balance" – a concept rather disheartening upon closer inspection. It implies, after all, that we must counter the downside – that which we must endure in order to make a living – with the upside – that which we long to do in order to feel alive. It implies allocating half of our waking hours to something we begrudge while anxiously awaiting the other half to arrive so we can live already. What a woefully shortchanging way to exist – lest we forget, so speaks Annie Dillard: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
In The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship(public library) – a book reminiscent of Parker Palmer's beautiful Thoreau-esque writings on the art of inner wholeness yet wholly revelatory in its own right – English poet and philosopher David Whyteaptly calls "work/life balance" a "phrase that often becomes a lash with which we punish ourselves" and offers an emboldening way out of this cultural trap. In an immensely insightful inquiry into these three primary commitments we all make in life, consciously or not, and the dynamics common to them all – the sequence of recognition, pursuit, disappointment, and recommitment – he explores "all those strange and inexplicable inner ways we belong to ourselves."
In a sentiment reminiscent of Emerson – who observed in his reflections on how we grow: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” – Whyte turns a skeptical eye toward the concept of "balance" between work and life:
Poets have never used the word balance, for good reason. First of all, it is too obvious and therefore untrustworthy; it is also a deadly boring concept and seems to speak as much to being stuck and immovable, as much as to harmony. There is also the sense of unbalancing that must take place in order to push a person into a new and larger set of circumstances.
[...]
The current understanding of work-life balance is too simplistic. People find it hard to balance work with family, family with self, because it might not be a question of balance. Some other dynamic is in play, something to do with a very human attempt at happiness that does not quantify different parts of life and then set them against one another. We are collectively exhausted because of our inability to hold competing parts of ourselves together in a more integrated way.
This longing for integration has always been part of the human experience, but today we ache for it more than ever as we face a culture that, in the wise and wonderful Courtney Martin's words, asks us to "show up as only slices of ourselves in different places." Whyte captures this beautifully:
These hidden human dynamics of integration are more of a conversation, more of a synthesis and more of an almost religious and sometimes almost delirious quest for meaning than a simple attempt at daily ease and contentment.
In a passage that calls to mind Wendell Berry's glorious meditation on solitude, Whyte details the trifecta of his inquiry:
Human beings are creatures of belonging, though they may come to that sense of belonging only through long periods of exile and loneliness. Interestingly, we belong to life as much through our sense that it is all impossible, as we do through the sense that we will accomplish everything we have set out to do. This sense of belonging and not belonging is lived out by most people through three principal dynamics: first, through relationship to other people and other living things (particularly and very personally, to one other living, breathing person in relationship or marriage); second, through work; and third, through an understanding of what it means to be themselves, discrete individuals alive and seemingly separate from everyone and everything else.
These are the three marriages, of Work, Self and Other.
[...]
We can call these three separate commitments marriages because at their core they are usually lifelong commitments and ... they involve vows made either consciously or unconsciously... To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.
Whyte draws the prefatory conclusion:
We should stop thinking in terms of work-life balance. Work-life balance is a concept that has us simply lashing ourselves on the back and working too hard in each of the three commitments. In the ensuing exhaustion we ultimately give up on one or more of them to gain an easier life.
I have always found the notion of compromising – particularly when it comes to this unfair tradeoff of work and life – to be a double-edged sword of meaning: on the one hand, a compromise implies reaching a happy medium between two conflicting needs; on the other, tocompromise requires the trimming off of excess in one area in order to alleviate a deficit in the other, which invariably means compromising – in the sense of undermining – the area deemed excessive. And yet, as Anaïs Nin memorably remarked her passionate case for the importance of excess in creative work, such compromising hardly benefits us in the end.
Whyte gets at this elegantly, noting that each of the three pursuits he explores "is, at its heart, nonnegotiable," and urges us to start thinking of each not as something to be balanced against the other two but as something "conversing with, questioning or emboldening the other two." Only then can we begin to shift away from "trading and bartering parts of ourselves as if they were salable commodities." Because work and life are not separate things, he argues, they can't be "balanced" against one another; instead, they are best treated as a "movable conversational frontier."
Beneath these seemingly contradictory demands of work and life, Whyte observes, are two deeper needs pulling us in opposite directions with equal force – our often exhausting desire to belong with our fellow human beings and our longing for solitude, for being "left completely and utterly alone, trawling the deep riches of an inner peace and quiet, where the self can actually seem lithe, movable, limitless and inviolate." And yet Whyte sees hope for reconciliation:
We can still make a real life even when crowded by other identities, or even when unbalanced and intoxicated with desire, or even when we are disappointed in work or love, and perhaps the way, at the center of all this deep love of belonging and this deep exhaustion of belonging, we may have waiting for us, at the end of the tunnel, a marriage of marriages, a life worth living, and one we can call, despite all the difficulties and imperfections, our very own.
Whyte draws a parallel between the first two marriages:
Work, like marriage, is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself. It is a place full of powerful undercurrents, a place to find our selves, but also, a place to drown, losing all sense of our own voice, our own contribution and conversation.
[...]
Good work like a good marriage needs a dedication to something larger than our own detailed, everyday needs; good work asks for promises to something intuited or imagined that is larger than our present understanding of it. We may not have an arranged ceremony at the altar to ritualize our dedication to work, but many of us can remember a specific moment when we realized we were made for a certain work, a certain career or a certain future: a moment when we held our hand in a fist and made unspoken vows to what we had just glimpsed.
[...]
Work is a constant conversation. It is the back-and-forth between what I think is me and what I think is not me; it is the edge between what the world needs of me and what I need of the world. Like the person to whom I am committed in a relationship, it is constantly changing and surprising me by its demands and needs but also by where it leads me, how much it teaches me, and especially, by how much tact, patience and maturity it demands of me.
In a sentiment that calls to mind Parker Palmer's wisdom on letting your life speak and Van Gogh's floundering to find his purpose, Whyte writes:
Work is a constant invisible question, sometimes nagging, sometimes cajoling, sometimes emboldening me; at its best beckoning me to follow a particular star to which I belong.
One can't help but think of Gabriel García Márquez's unlikely path to becoming a writer as Whyte adds:
If children move into their late teens with no inkling of their future vocation, not even a glimpse of the star, it is time for the adult world around them to become rightly and increasingly worried. At this point a seemingly wrongheaded but determined direction is far better than none at all. It may be, in fact, that most of the great work done by individuals through history has often been accomplished through long years of dedicated wrongheadedness.
And yet the most challenging marriage of all is the invisible, private one behind the two public-facing commitments of work and relationship – "the internal and often secret marriage to that tricky movable frontier called ourselves." While poets and psychologists agree that the self is a fluid phenomenon and there is no such thing as fixed personality, we still cling to the comforting falsehood that the self is a stable foundation. And yet in its very instability, Whyte suggests, lies its promise of satisfaction – the self "moves and changes and surprises us as much as anything in the outer world to which it wants to commit," and that outer world invariably shapes our inner experience. He captures this with a philosopher-poet's lyrical precision:
We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel.
[...]
Neglecting this internal marriage, we can easily make ourselves a hostage to the externals of work and the demands of relationship. We find ourselves unable to move in these outer marriages because we have no inner foundation from which to step out with a firm persuasion. It is as if, absent a loving relationship with this inner representation of our self, we fling ourselves in all directions in our outer lives, looking for love in all the wrong places.
Echoing Rilke's exquisite meditation on how we hide from ourselvesand Seneca's on the shortness of life, Whyte adds:
Not only can we become afraid of these internal questions, but also we can become terrified of the spaces or silences in which these questions might arise. The act of stopping can be the act of facing something we have kept hidden from ourselves for a very long time.
[...]
The marriage with the self is difficult because it is connected to the great questions of life that refuse to go away and which are also connected to our own mortality. In the silences that accompany a strong internal relationship with the self we see not only the truth of our present circumstances and a way forward but we also realize how short our stay is on this earth. Life waits for us in this internal marriage, but death waits for us also.
As if driven by Mary Oliver's existential prod "urgent as a knife," Whyte reminds us that it pays to imagine immensities and writes:
This willingness to look at the transitory nature of existence [is] not pessimism but absolute realism: life is to be taken at the tilt, you do not have forever, and therefore why wait? Why wait ... to become a faithful and intimate companion to that initially formidable stranger you called your self?
He considers what marriage – any marriage, in all three domains – asks of us, and what it stands to give:
It is almost like a mutual invitation to which both partners must respond wholeheartedly. It includes as much of the future in its gravitational pull as it does any present particularities. It is something that lives over the horizon as much as it exists in the here and now. It is full of keen daily pleasures and shattering disappointments. From all of these early, optimistic appearances and depressing disappearances we realize we have had a first glimpse of secret imagined possibilities, until now unspoken.
In the remainder of The Three Marriages – a tremendously rewarding read in its totality – Whyte delves into the details of each domain, fortifying his poetic and practical insights with lived examples from the lives of such creative luminaries as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson. Complement it with Ursula Nordstrom's letter to young Maurice Sendak on the cohesion of creative purpose, Parker Palmer on how to live with inner wholeness, and the story of how Van Gogh found his purpose.
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 Centuries after Montaigne contemplated the double meaning of meditation and decades before Western science confirmed what Eastern philosophy has known for millennia – that meditation is our greatest gateway to self-transcendence and that by transforming our minds it is actually transforming our bodies – Alan Watts began popularizing Eastern spiritual teachings in the West and meditation wove itself into the fabric of popular culture.
Among the early converts in the 1950s wasJack Kerouac (March 12, 1922–October 21, 1969), who became so besotted with the ancient practice that he extolled its rewards in a poem, later included in The Portable Jack Kerouac(public library) – the same treasure trove of stories, poems, letters, and essays on Buddhism that gave us Kerouac on kindness, the self illusion and the "Golden Eternity," the crucial difference between genius and talent, and his "beliefs and techniques" for prose and life.
HOW TO MEDITATE
– lights out –
fall, hands a-clasped, into instantaneous
ecstasy like a shot of heroin or morphine,
the gland inside of my brain discharging
the good glad fluid (Holy Fluid) as
I hap-down and hold all my body parts
down to a deadstop trance – Healing
all my sicknesses – erasing all – not
even the shred of a "I-hope-you" or a
Loony Balloon left in it, but the mind
blank, serene, thoughtless. When a thought
comes a-springing from afar with its held-
forth figure of image, you spoof it out,
you spuff it out, you fake it, and
it fades, and thought never comes – and
with joy you realize for the first time
"Thinking's just like not thinking –
So I don't have to think
any
more"
Many more records of Kerouac's foray into Eastern teachings can be found in The Portable Jack Kerouac. Complement this particular one with neuroscientist Sam Harris on the paradox of meditation, journalist Jo Marchant on how our minds actually affect our bodies, and David Lynch on meditation as a creative anchor, then revisit Patti Smith'smasterful music adaptation of Kerouac.
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 Virginia Woolf aptly called letter writing"the humane art." But what amplifies the humanity and immediacy of words is the addition of art itself – how instantly aliveVan Gogh's illustrated letters feel, to say nothing of Edward Gorey's envelope drawings.
That magical marriage of epistolary text and image is what Liza Kirwin explores in More than Words: Illustrated Letters from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art (public library) – a wonderful selection of love letters, thank-you notes, travel missives, visual instructions, picture-puzzles and plays on words from the world's largest repository of artists' papers, featuring missives from creative titans like Marcel Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth, Alexander Calder, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Kirwin, who serves as deputy director of the venerable archive and has also culled from it the illustrated lists and inventories of great artists, begins the book with a perfect line from a letter the great American graphic artist John Graham wrote to his third wife, Elinor, in July of 1958 – a gem from the archive's John Graham Papers collection:
Letter writing is probably the most beautiful manifestation in human relations, in fact, it is its finest residue.
The illustrated letter is an even more beautiful such manifestation, as artist Walter Kuhn remarked in a letter to his wife: "One should never forget that the power of words is limited."
Lyonel Feininger to Alfred Churchill, May 20, 1890
German-American Expressionist painter and comic strip artist Lyonel Feininger asserted this sentiment with double the ardor in a May 1890 letter to the art critic and lecturer Alfred Churchill:
I will ... make one more demand upon your friendship, also it is your promise to me before we parted. viz: to illustrate your letters! If it is only a little landscape or a simple figure, or any little sketch or sketches illustrating the text of your letters, it will be just as welcome and will do you very considerably good in helping you on in penwork or ready interpretation of any little conception you may wish to put on paper.
Frida Kahlo to Emmy Lou Packard, October 24, 1940
Among the many gems is one from Frida Kahlo – who was a prolific letter writer, most notably of gorgeous and profound illustrated love letters to Diego Rivera – thanking muralist Emmy Lou Packard for taking such good care of Rivera during his trip to San Francisco. The couple had divorced a year earlier, and yet Kahlo writes, illustrating the letter with lipsticked smooches:
Kiss Diego for me and tell him I love him more than my own life.
Kahlo and Rivera remarried a few weeks later and remained together, not without tumult, until death did them part. Years later, as he recalledfirst meeting the teenage Kahlo, Rivera would consider her "the most important fact" of his life.
Joseph Lindon Smith to his parents, September 8, 1894
Among the most charming specimens from the section on travel letters is one from Joseph Lindon Smith to his parents, listing in beautiful penmanship and delightful illustrations the masses of fruit he was consuming during his 1894 trip to Venice:
Delicious fruits are here in Venice now, and I consume vast quantities of it. Melons, pears, peaches, plums, apples, figs, grapes and other things unknown to my interior.
[...]
I eat fruit so much of the time and so much at a time that I go to bed at night expecting.
But folded into this playful admission of dietary excess is Smith's larger and graver meditation on the excesses and pretensions of the art world. With the conflicted ambivalence not uncommon in artists – a polarizing pull between wanting commercial success on the one hand and having deep disdain for the system that bestows it on the other – he recounts his visit with the prominent American art patron Isabella Steward Gardner:
Mrs. Gardner wishes so much to have the extreme pleasure of having me make her a visit there that I have promised to go over on Wednesday and end my visit in Venice there.
I lunched there yesterday and showed my pictures and dined with the Brimmers and again passed them all out and told the same little anecdotes with the same inflexion of voice – and they seemed pleased and Colleroni and I are pretty well set up and conceited – for when they weren't admiring him – they were the workmanship – and I simply floated home in air I was that puffed up my waistcoat hasn't a button to its name – and the upper part of my trousers looks like two funnels.
And you will ask – you miserable money ideaed things you sordid American parents you will ask if I sold any pictures to Mrs. Gardner – so I will just say yes – "it was bit off" – and with love to you all
I remain your little sonnie JoJo
Joseph Lindon Smith to his parents, June 15, 1894
Smith's irreverent playfulness and his conflicted attitude toward the art world appear in another letter to his parents from that spring, when he was holding informal exhibitions four evenings a week and buyers – mostly American collectors visiting Venice – were clamoring to buy his work. Illustrating his letter with a drawing that captures perfectly this duality of the artist as panhandler and fashionable commodity, he writes:
Dear Mother and Father,
"It never rains but it pours."
Behold your son painting under a shower of gold. I am selling pictures on every side and every day. – And we are feeling very much set up and bloated at Palazzo Dario these days.
[...]
I am going to make this last picture the best thing I have ever done.
J. Kathleen White to Ellen Hulda Johnson, September 1, 1986
Another letter marks a turning point in the history of computing technology. In the fall of 1986, artist and writer J. Kathleen Whitebrags in a letter to art historian Ellen Hulda Johnson about using a computer to draw a cat, a dog, and a bird:
These household pets here pictured come from computer land.
Alexander Calder to Ben Shahn, February 24, 1949
Then there are those practical matters for which words simply don't suffice – such as directions. In his letter of invitation to artist Ben Shahn, the great Alexander Calder encloses a hand-drawn map to his home – and it somehow feels like one of his iconic mobiles.
Andy Warhol to Russell Lynes, 1949
Another such oblique assurance comes from Andy Warhol. Immediately after graduating from college and moving to New York City – where his overbearing mother would soon follow him to take care of her son through poverty – Warhol applied for a job at Harper's. Without the slightest care for punctuation or capitalization, except when it comes to his own name, 21-year-old Warhol answers editor Russell Lynes's request for biographical information:
Hello mr. lynes
thank you very much
biographical information
my life couldn't fill a penny post card i was born in pittsburgh in 1928 (like everybody else – in a steel mill)
i graduated from carnegie tech now i'm in NY city moving from one roach infested apartment to another.
Andy Warhol.
And yet later that year, Lynes gave Warhol one of his first jobs – to illustrate a John Cheever short story for Harper's. It would be another decade before he began working as a low-level art director at Doubleday, producing his little-known children's book illustrations – he filled the time by collaborating with his mother on feline drawings – and nearly twenty years before he established himself as a pop culture icon.
Yves Saint-Laurent to Alexander Liberman, June 7, 1970
Perhaps the tenderest letter in the book is also an elegant homage to time and place. Legendary French couturier Yves Saint-Laurentwrites his affectionate letter to his dear friend and Vogue art director Alexander Liberman inside a sketch of a traditional Islamic cloak typically worn by women in Marrakech, where the designer had a home, against a background of a traditional Moroccan pattern.
My very very dear Alex
I am here, in Marrakech
and I am thinking of you as always
of your friendship, loyalty
and your sincerity
I hope to see you as soon as possible and hug you
I love you with all my heart
Yves
But my favorite letter comes from beloved author and contemplator of life Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, penned shortly after the completion of his masterwork The Little Prince – the manuscript of which he also illustrated.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry to Hedda Sterne, 1943
The letter is merely a dinner invitation to his friend, but it is the postscript, referencing the completion of The Little Prince, that makes it irresistibly endearing and bittersweet:
P.S. A nuisance delayed this letter that did not leave but – to be very honest – I am so proud of my masterpiece that I send it to you anyway.
About a year later Saint-Exupéry, left on a reconnaissance mission as a fighter pilot, never to return. He was forty-four – a biographical detail utterly eerie given that in Saint-Exupéry's beloved book, the Little Prince watches the sun set exactly forty-four times.
More than Words is an absolute treat in its totality. Complement it with Kirwin's other collection, Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Collections of the Smithsonian Museum, then revisit Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz's illustrated love letters and Lewis Carroll's rules of letter writing.
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