Reads tagged with “diaries”
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.”
Mushrooms: Cellist Zoë Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit
“Our foot’s in the door.”
Virginia Woolf on the Courage to Create Rather Than Cater and the Remedy for Self-Doubt
“One must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling.”
A Chaos of Delight: Darwin on the Sublimity and Transcendence of Nature
“No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”
Life and Death and More Life: Leo Tolstoy on Science, Spirituality, and Our Search for Meaning
“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.”
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.
Kierkegaard on How to Save Yourself
“I am, in the deepest sense, an unhappy individual who since my earliest days have been nailed fast to some suffering close to insanity.”
Loneliness and the Trinity of Creativity: Ada Lovelace, the Poles of the Mind, and the Source of Her Imaginative Powers
“Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds… may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne on How to Look and Really See
“The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.”
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