Reads tagged with “Walt Whitman”
The Unphotographabe: Walt Whitman on Birds Migrating at Midnight
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 Soul, the Universe, and the Vastness of Music: Composer Caroline Shaw Brings Whitman and Tennyson to Life in the Spirit of the Golden Record
“Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.”
Kosmos: Artist Dustin Yellin Reads Walt Whitman’s Timeless Hymn to Human Nature as a Miniature of the Universe
A song of praise for that place in us housing “the past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.”
Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past
Life-tested wisdom on how to live from James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leo Tolstoy, Seneca, Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, Viktor Frankl, Rachel Carson, and Hannah Arendt.
The Best of Brain Pickings 2020
A glance over the shoulder of time to reveal the patterns, themes, and ideas that steady us and shelter us in the tempest of life.
Emerson on How to Trust Yourself and What Solitude Really Means
“It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Poet Mark Doty on Connection and Creativity
“We are all co-extensive, and our work is to move toward union… We must know our fellows in order for everything to move forward; it is our spiritual imperative to connect, or else the destiny of the world cannot be completed.”
Rebecca Solnit on Trees and the Shape of Time
“Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.”
Love, Death, and Whitman: Poet Mark Doty on the Paradox of Desire and the Courage to Love Against the Certitude of Loss
“Isn’t the flesh a way to drink of the fountain of otherhood, a way to taste the not-I, a way to blur the edges and thus feel the fact of them?… You need to both remember where love leads and love anyway; you can both see the end of desire and be consumed by it all at once.”
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