Reads tagged with “books”
The Art of Divination: D.H. Lawrence on the Power of Pure Attention
“An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer.”
The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self: How a Circle of Friends and Lovers United Nature and Human Nature
“Mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind.”
The Choreography of Everyday Life: A Leaping Antidote to Our Modern Loneliness
Finding that vitalizing “a reciprocity between us perceiving the world together through art, and the world in turn reading us through what we make.”
How the Eel Almost Became America’s Thanksgiving Food
“At night, he came home with as many eels as he could well lift in one hand, which our people were glad of. They were fat & sweet.”
The Unphotographable: Jack Kerouac’s Soaring Diary Entry About Self-Understanding and the Elemental Vastness of the Windblown World
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.
Farmhouse: Sophie Blackall’s Poetic Illustrated Tribute to Time and Tenderness
“Over a hill, at the end of a road, by a glittering stream that twists and turns, stands a house…”
Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Almost Unbearably Sweet Account of Sole-Parenting His Small Son
“Mercy on me, was ever man before so be-pelted with a child’s talk as I am! It is his desire of sympathy that lies at the bottom of the great heap of his babblement.”
The Art of Receiving: John Steinbeck on the True Meaning of Gratitude
“It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness.”
How We Co-Create and Recreate the World: Octavio Paz on Sor Juana, Poetry as Rebellion, and the Creative Collaboration Between Writers and Readers
“A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions.”
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