“Ultimately, we are puppets of both pain and pleasure, occasionally made free by our creativity.” “A purely disembodied emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his revolutionary theory of how our bodies affect our feelings just before the birth of neuroscience — a science still young, which has already revolutionized our understanding of the […]
“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster… Since finitude defines our lives… living a truly authentic life — becoming fully human — means facing up to that fact.” A decade ago, when I first began practicing with […]
From the river to the Milky Way, by way of trees, geese, and unsung heroes. Great children’s books are works of existential philosophy in disguise — gifts of timeless consolation for the eternal child living in each of us, on the pages of which some of the most visionary minds of every era are formed. […]
An uncommonly original and tenderhearted celebration of how an artist becomes an artist. Childhood is one great brush-stroke of loneliness, thick and pastel-colored, its edges blurring out into the whole landscape of life. In this blur of being by ourselves, we learn to be ourselves. One measure of maturity might be how well we grow […]
“Perhaps dreams are an arena that can enable supracognitive powers to perform calculations and perceptions of reality that may be incomprehensible in our wake state.” “The logic of dreams is superior to the one we exercise while awake,” the artist, philosopher, and poet Etel Adnan wrote as she considered creativity and the nocturnal imagination. It […]
“Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?” Almost everything I write, I “write” in the notebook of the mind, with the foot in motion — what happens at the keyboard upon returning from the long daily […]
There has been no shortage of excellent work in both fiction and nonfiction this year. Read More
“What is it that makes it possible to do the work that is of highest value to others and one’s central purpose in life? It may appear — to others, sometimes even to oneself — trivial, irrelevant, indulgent, pointless, distracted, or any of those other pejoratives with which the quantifiable beats down the unquantifiable.” There […]
Enlarge / Grab a hot drink, snuggle up, and let the staff of the Ars Orbiting HQ find you a good book to read. (credit: iStock / Getty Images Plus) With the holiday season kicking in and many people about to find themselves flush with downtime, we thought we’d try to answer a perennial question: […]
“There is no pit you cannot climb out of provided you make the right effort at the right place… do the next thing with diligence and devotion.” In recent seasons of being, I have had occasion to reflect on the utterly improbable trajectory of my life, plotted not by planning but by living. We long […]