“Through your words I feel so close to you that I can feel your laughter, so clean and honest.” In the hottest month of 1913, the Stockinger Printing Company in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, hired as a colorist and engraver a twenty-one-year-old Hungarian artist who had just arrived in America as a refugee with $25 and an […]
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” I will never forget the day I first encountered, in the midst of heartache, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911–October 6, 1979) — a poem I have lived with for years, a poem that has helped me live. Composed when Bishop was sorrowing after a […]
“Books read us back to ourselves… The escape into another story reminds us that we too are another story. Not caught, not confined, not predestined.” “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” Kafka wrote to his childhood friend just as he was setting out on a life of making and […]
A collaborative praise song for “indifference banished by love.” In one of the essays collected in Vesper Flights (public library) — which was among the finest books of 2020 and includes one of the most magnificent things ever written about the enchantment of the total solar eclipse — Helen Macdonald reflects on watching starlings swarm […]
“Things have roots and branches… If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed.” Two and a half millennia before Leonard Cohen wrote in his timeless and tender ode to democracy that “the heart has got to open in a fundamental way,” the ancient Chinese philosopher and statesman Confucius (551–479 BCE) recognized the […]
“We do not know why we are born into the world, but we can try to find out what sort of world it is.” In 1908, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, who revolutionized astronomy long before they could vote — was analyzing photographic plates at the Harvard […]
“Nothing can equal the psychological effect of real art — neither factual descriptions nor intellectual discussion.” “Tyrants always fear art because tyrants want to mystify while art tends to clarify,” Iris Murdoch wrote in her arresting 1972 address on art as a force of resistance. “Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics […]
Strange signals from the lacuna between street art and microbiology. I noticed them first in my neighborhood — dots of paint hovering over the grate of the storm drain in a blue-green spectrum punctuated by white. I noticed them probably because I had been writing about the wondrous science of the color blue and my […]
“The very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.” When I walk — which I do every day, as basic sanity-maintenance, whether in the forest or the cemetery or the city street — I walk the same routes, walk along loops, […]
“The day ends. The night falls. And in between… there is the blue hour.” Blue, Rebecca Solnit wrote in one of humanity’s most beautiful reflections on our planet’s primary hue, is “the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here… the color of longing for the distances you never arrive […]