Maria Popova
A while ago —time moves right along when one is having fun — I noted in Reckonings a promising new adventure called Brain Pickings, home to the creative spirit of a singular young woman, a gifted artist and collector of diverse wisdom and beauty, Maria Popova. Brain Pickings is now 7 years old, and Maria is celebrating its birthday with a collection of marvelous things she has learned in those 7 years of "reading, writing and living."
In the age-old spirit of gift giving, Brain Pickings is free, but gifts remain gifts only as they are reciprocated and passed on. If you find it of value in your life, your love and work, please consider a donation. As Maria writes, "I love researching and writing Brain Pickings. But it takes hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars a month to sustain. Keeping it a clean, ad-free reading experience — which is important to me and, I hope, to you — means it’s subsidized by the generous support of readers like you: directly, through donations, and indirectly, whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on Brain Pickings, which sends me a small percentage of its price. So if you find any joy and stimulation in it, please consider a modest donation — however much you can afford, when it comes from the heart, it’s the kind of gesture that makes me warm with appreciation."
Now to offer Reckonings readers a taste — a week's and a 7 years' feast — of Brain Pickings:
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Happy Birthday, Brain Pickings: 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living
On October 23, 2006, I sent a short email to a few friends at work – one of the four jobs I held while paying my way through college – with the subject line "brain pickings," announcing my intention to start a weekly digest featuring five stimulating things to learn about each week, from a breakthrough in neuroscience to a timeless piece of poetry. "It should take no more than 4 minutes (hopefully much less) to read," I promised. This was the inception of Brain Pickings. At the time, I neither planned nor anticipated that this tiny experiment would one day be included in the Library of Congress digital archive of "materials of historical importance" and the few friends would become millions of monthly readers all over the world, ranging from the Dutch high school student who wrote to me this morning to my 77-year-old grandmother in Bulgaria to the person in Wisconsin who mailed me strudel last week. (Thank you!) Above all, I had no idea that in the seven years to follow, this labor of love would become my greatest joy and most profound source of personal growth, my life and my living, my sense of purpose, my center. (For the curious, more on the origin story here.)
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from I'll Be You and You Be Me by Ruth Krauss, 1954.
Looking back today on the thousands of hours I've spent researching and writing Brain Pickings and the countless collective hours of readership it has germinated – a smile-inducing failure on the four-minute promise – I choke up with gratitude for the privilege of this journey, for its endless rewards of heart, mind and spirit, and for all the choices along the way that made it possible. I'm often asked to offer advice to young people who are just beginning their own voyages of self-discovery, or those reorienting their calling at any stage of life, and though I feel utterly unqualified to give "advice" in that omniscient, universally wise sense the word implies, here are seven things I've learned in seven years of making those choices, of integrating "work" and life in such inextricable fusion, and in chronicling this journey of heart, mind and spirit – a journey that took, for whatever blessed and humbling reason, so many others along for the ride. I share these here not because they apply to every life and offer some sort of blueprint to existence, but in the hope that they might benefit your own journey in some small way, bring you closer to your own center, or even simply invite you to reflect on your own sense of purpose.
Illustration from Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children's Literature 1920-35
- Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for "negative capability."We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our "opinions" based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It's enormously disorienting to simply say, "I don't know." But it's infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right – even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
- Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, "prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like." Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don't make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night – and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
- Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It's so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life's greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.
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Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.
Most importantly, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?
- When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don't believe them.You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those who misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
- Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living – for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, "how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
- "Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time." This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it's hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that – a myth – as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I've reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we're not interested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.
One of Maurice Sendak's vintage posters celebrating the joy of reading
Then, just for good measure, here are seven of my favorite pieces from the past seven years. (Yes, it is exactly like picking your favorite child – so take it with a grain of salt.)
Vintage Illustrations for the Fairy Tales E. E. Cummings Wrote for His Only Child
In 1916, at the peak of World War I and shortly after graduating from Harvard, beloved poet E. E. Cummings penned an epithalamion – a poem celebrating nuptials – for his classmate and close friend Scofield Thayer's marriage to his fiancé Elaine Orr. The newlyweds moved to Chicago and Cummings was drafted to serve in France, where he spent some months in prison for his unapologetic anti-war views. By the time he returned to New York in 1918, the Thayers were living in two separate apartments at Washington Square. Cummings's old friend, who had risen to an influential position in literary circles, became the poet's patron, supporting his poetry and even purchasing his paintings – a context that makes the affair Cummings undertook with Elaine all the more morally suspect, even though the poet knew his friend's insistence on wanting to focus on work was merely a veil for his loss of interest in his wife.
In May of 1919, Elaine became pregnant with Cummings's child – something that threw an even more destabilizing curveball in what was already a triangle of impending disaster. To make matters worse, Cummings shirked his responsibility as a father and abandoned Elaine. Thayer, even though he knew the truth of paternity, stepped in to raise little Nancy once she was born on December 20, 1919. It took Cummings nearly a year to come around – in October of 1920, once it became clear that the Thayers were divorcing, he rekindled his relationship with Elaine and began seeing his daughter, who came to call him Mopsy, daily. The following year, the three moved to Paris, but Elaine, supported by Thayer's alimony, lived comfortably in a large apartment, while Cummings, having lost his patron but bent on keeping the remnants of his dignity, lived the classic poor-writer's life in his own humble quarters. He did, however, set out to build a relationship with his baby daughter, his only child, which he did the best way he knew how – by telling her original stories he made up for her.
In 1965, three years after Cummings's death, four of these stories – "The Elephant & the Butterfly," "The Little Girl Named I," "The House That Ate Mosquito Pie," and "The Old Man Who Said 'Why?'" – were collected in a slim volume simply titled Fairy Tales (public library) – a fine addition to the little-known children's books of famous authors, including gems by Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Anne Sexton,T. S. Eliot and John Updike.
The stories, while closer to fables than to fairy tales, are nonetheless charming and doubly so thanks to the gorgeous illustrations by Canadian artist John Eaton. I've tracked down a surviving copy of the original edition for our shared enjoyment:
Complement Cummings's Fairy Tales with 17 whimsical songs based on his poetry.
Dani Shapiro on the Pleasures and Perils of Writing and the Creative Life
"At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace," Annie Dillard famously observed, adding the quintessential caveat, "It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then – and only then – it is handed to you." And yet, Zadie Smith admonished in her 10 rules of writing, it's perilous to romanticize the "vocation of writing":"There is no ‘writer’s lifestyle.’ All that matters is what you leave on the page."
Still, surely there must be more to it than that – whole worlds rise and fall, entire universes blossom and die daily in that enchanted space between the writer's sensation of writing and the word's destiny of being written on a page. For all that's been mulled about the writing life and its perpetual osmosis of everyday triumphs and tragedies, its existential feats and failures, at its heart remains an immutable mystery – how can a calling be at once so transcendent and so soul-crushing, and what is it that enthralls so many souls into its paradoxical grip, into feeling compelled to write "not because they can but because they have to"? That, and oh so much more, is what Dani Shapiro explores in Still Writing: The Pleasures and Perils of a Creative Life (public library) – her magnificent memoir of the writing life, at once disarmingly personal and brimming with widely resonant wisdom on the most universal challenges and joys of writing.
Shapiro opens with the kind of crisp conviction that underpins the entire book:
Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write.
Book sculpture by an anonymous artist left at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse
Far from a lazy aphorism, however, this proclamation comes from her own hard-earned experience – fragments of which resonate deeply with most of us, on one level or another – that Shapiro synthesizes beautifully:
Paper Typewriter by artist Jennifer Collier
Above all, however, Shapiro's core point has to do with courage and the creative life:
In other words, it requires grit – the science of which earned psychologist Angela Duckworth her recent MacArthur "genius" grant and the everyday art of which earns actual geniuses their status.
Writing is also, as Shapiro poetically puts it, a way "to forge a path out of [our] own personal wilderness with words" – a way to both exercise and exorcise our most fundamental insecurities and to practice what Rilke so memorably termed living the questions, the sort of "negative capability" of embracing uncertainty that Keats thought was so fundamental to the creative process. Shapiro echoes that Dillardian insistence on presence as the heart of the creative life:
Flights of mind by artist Vita Wells. Click image for more.
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The page is your mirror. What happens inside you is reflected back. You come face-to-face with your own resistance, lack of balance, self-loathing, and insatiable ego—and also with your singular vision, guts, and fortitude. No matter what you’ve achieved the day before, you begin each day at the bottom of the mountain. … Life is usually right there, though, ready to knock us over when we get too sure of ourselves. Fortunately, if we have learned the lessons that years of practice have taught us, when this happens, we endure. We fail better. We sit up, dust ourselves off, and begin again.
In fact, it's hard not to feel Dillard's influence and the echo of her voice in Shapiro's own words as she considers the conflicted yet inexorable mesmerism of writing:
These rewards manifest not as grand honors and prizes and bestseller rankings – though hardly any writer would deny the warming pleasure of those, however fleeting – but in the cumulative journey of becoming. As Cheryl Strayed put it in her timelessly revisitable meditation on life, "The useless days will add up to something. . . . These things are your becoming." Ultimately, Shapiro seconds this sentiment by returning to the notion of presence and the art of looking as the centripetal force that summons the scattered fragments of our daily experience into our cumulative muse – a testament to the combinatorial nature of creativity, reassuring us that no bit of life is "useless" and reminding us of the vital importance of what Stephen King has termed the art of "creative sleep." Shapiro writes:
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To allow ourselves to spend afternoons watching dancers rehearse, or sit on a stone wall and watch the sunset, or spend the whole weekend rereading Chekhov stories—to know that we are doing what we’re supposed to be doing – is the deepest form of permission in our creative lives. The British author and psychologist Adam Phillips has noted, “When we are inspired, rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves.” This is the feeling I think we all yearn for, a kind of hyperreal dream state. We read Emily Dickinson. We watch the dancers. We research a little known piece of history obsessively. We fall in love. We don’t know why, and yet these moments form the source from which all our words will spring.
Complement Still Writing, which is soul-quenching in its entirety, with famous writers' advice on the craft, then revisit Annie Dillard on writing.
Art as Therapy: Alain de Botton on the 7 Psychological Functions of Art
The question of what art is has occupied humanity since the dawn of recorded history. For Tolstoy, the purpose of art was to provide a bridge of empathy between us and others, and for Anaïs Nin, a way to exorcise our emotional excess. But the highest achievement of art might be something that reconciles the two: a channel of empathy into our own psychology that lets us both exorcise and better understand our emotions – in other words, a form of therapy.
In Art as Therapy (public library), philosopher Alain de Botton – who has previously examined such diverse and provocative subjects as why work doesn't work, what education and the arts can learn from religion, and how to think more about sex – teams up with art historian John Armstrong to examine art's most intimate purpose: its ability to mediate our psychological shortcomings and assuage our anxieties about imperfection. Their basic proposition is that, far more than mere aesthetic indulgence, art is a tool – a tool that serves a rather complex yet straightforwardly important purpose in our existence:
De Botton and Armstrong go on to outline the seven core psychological functions of art:
1. REMEMBERING
Given the profound flaws of our memory and the unreliability of its self-revision, it's unsurprising that the fear of forgetting – forgetting specific details about people and places, but also forgetting all the minute, mundane building blocks that fuse together into the general wholeness of who we are – would be an enormous source of distress for us. Since both memory and art are as much about what is being left out as about what is being spotlighted, de Botton and Armstrong argue that art offers an antidote to this unease:
'We don't just observe her, we get to know what is important about her.' Johannes Vermeer, 'Woman in Blue Reading a Letter' (1663).
Art, then, is not only what rests in the frame, but is itself a frame for experience:
2. HOPE
Our conflicted relationship with beauty presents a peculiar paradox: The most universally admired art is of the "pretty" kind – depictions of cheerful and pleasant scenes, faces, objects, and situations – yet "serious" art critics and connoisseurs see it as a failure of taste and of intelligence. (Per Susan Sontag's memorable definition, the two are inextricably intertwined anyway: "Intelligence … is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.") De Bottom and Armstrong consider the implications:
But these worries, they argue, are misguided. Optimism, rather than a failure of intelligence, is a critical cognitive and psycho-emotional skill in our quest to live well – something even neuroscience has indicated– and hope, its chariot, is something to cherish, not condemn:
Put simply and poignantly, it pays to "imagine immensities."
'What hope might look like.' Henry Matisse, 'Dance' (II), 1909.
They offer an example:
And so we return to why prettiness sings to us:
[…]
We should be able to enjoy an ideal image without regarding it as a false picture of how things usually are. A beautiful, though partial, vision can be all the more precious to us because we are so aware of how rarely life satisfies our desires.
3. SORROW
Since we're creatures of infinite inner contradiction, art can help us be more whole, not only by expanding our capacity for positive emotions but also by helping us to fully inhabit and metabolize the negative – and by doing so with dignity, and by reminding us "of the legitimate place of sorrow in a good life":
'Sublimation: the transformation of suffering into beauty.' Nan Goldin, 'Siobhan in My Mirror' (1992).
Above all, de Botton and Armstrong argue, art helps us feel less alone in our suffering, to which the social expression of our private sorrows lends a kind of affirmative dignity. They offer an example in the work of photographer Nan Goldin, who explored the lives of the queer community with equal parts curiosity and respect long before champions like Andrew Sullivan first pulled the politics of homosexuality into the limelight of mainstream cultural discourse:
Therein, they argue, lies one of art's greatest gifts:
4. REBALANCING
With our fluid selves, clusters of tormenting contradictions, and culture of prioritizing productivity over presence, no wonder we find ourselves in need of recentering. That's precisely what art can offer:
This function of art also helps explain the vast diversity of our aesthetic preferences – because our individual imbalances differ, so do the artworks we seek out to soothe them:
Viewing art from this perspective, de Botton and Armstrong argue, also affords us the necessary self-awareness to understand why we might respond negatively to a piece of art – an insight that might prevent us from reactive disparagement. Being able to recognize what someone lacks in order to find an artwork beautiful allows us to embody that essential practice of prioritizing understanding over self-righteousness. In this respect, art is also a tuning – and atoning – mechanism for our moral virtues. In fact, some of history's most celebrated art is anchored on moralistic missions – what de Botton and Armstrong call "an attempt to encourage our better selves through coded messages of exhortation and admonition" – to which we often respond with resistance and indignation. But such reactions miss the bigger point:
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