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Wendell Berry on Hope, Despair, and the Measure of Effective Protest
The current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind. Protest is what we...
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The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy...
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read...
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Italo Calvino on Reading and Sex
“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies… differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear… What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times...
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The Creative Power of Uncertainty: Polish Poet Wisława Szymborska’s...
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” “Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion,” the great painter Richard...
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Wendell Berry on Solitude and the Two Great Enemies of Creative Work
“True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible… In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.” “One can’t write...
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Everything Is Already There: Javier Marías on the Courage to Heed Your...
“This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it.” It starts with a tremble in the stomach, a palpitation...
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The Power of Being a Threshold Person: Liminality, Communitas, and the...
“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” one of the Moomins observes in Tove Jansson’s masterwork of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. It takes a...
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The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy
“You’ll long for me when I’m gone… You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave… Kiss my face instead!” “What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote in her short,...
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How to Handle Provocation: Bertrand Russell’s Remarkable Response to a Fascist
“The emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.” “To approach someone else convincingly...
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The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother
“It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.” One of the hardest realizations in life, and one of the most liberating, is that our mothers are neither saints nor saviors — they...
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How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and...
It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing....
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How to Relate to Your Worst Mistakes: The Life-Shaping Difference Between...
You know it, that awful moment your coherent self-image shatters and a part of you, shadowy and untended, splits off to cause harm and havoc as the rest of you watches helplessly, wincing. You know the...
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Erich Fromm’s 6 Rules of Listening: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and...
“Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.” “An experience makes its appearance only when it is...
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How to Apologize: Reflections on Forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, and the...
“It’s permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful human.” Few things in life are more painful than seeing ourselves act in ways orthogonal to our own values,...
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The True Purpose of Tarot
“Nothing like this has ever happened before or will ever happen again,” a friend said to me about a lucky turn of events — a statement that struck me as touchingly self-negating: a recognition that...
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I Long to Read More in the Book of You: Moomins Creator Tove Jansson’s Tender...
“I’m so unused to being happy that I haven’t really come to terms with what it involves… I feel like a garden that’s finally been watered, so my flowers can bloom.” “All things are so very uncertain,...
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Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture,...
“The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.” “A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his pioneering 1884 theory of how our bodies affect...
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How Not to Waste Your Wildness
“What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into...
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How to Break Free from the Tyranny of Certainty: The Japanese Concept of “Ma”
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,'” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But despite all we know about the...
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Kahlil Gibran on the Courage to Weather the Uncertainties of Love
“Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.” “Love is the quality of attention we pay to things,” poet J.D. McClatchy wrote in his beautiful...
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