Reads tagged with “culture”

The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular
“Everything impinges on everything else… Everything is potentially everywhere.”

How to Be a Swimmer in the Stream of Time: Poet, Painter, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on the Antidote to Disorientation and Isolation
“The definition of the soul is made of these places where you feel that the world came into being so that they could exist.”

How to Be Un-Dead: Anaïs Nin and D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Living Fully
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”

Beethoven and the Art of Amends
“When friends are at variance, it is always better to employ no mediator, but to communicate directly with each other.”

The Unphotographable #7: Richard Powers on the Majestic Mass Migration of Sandhill Cranes
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.

The Temple of Flora: Stunning Illustrations of Flowers Inspired by Erasmus Darwin’s Radical Scientific Poem About the Sexual Reproduction of Plants
“If thou art perfectly at leisure… walk in, and view the wonders of my enchanted garden.”

The Woman Who Saved Native Song
“We understand the people better if we know their music, and we appreciate the music better if we understand the people themselves.”

Reclaiming Our Human Potential in the Age of Technological “Progress”
“People now use less than half their potential forces because ‘Progress’ has deprived them of the incentive to live fully.”

The Otherworldly Wonders of This World: Stunning 19th-Century Natural History Illustrations of Lizards
From geckos to chameleons, a scaly journey down the hallway of evolutionary time through the portal of beauty.

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