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How to Say “YES” to Your Life
It started with an urn for living gone wrong, the clay kiltering off center, resisting my every effort to force it back into shape. The harder I pushed to control it, the more it took on a life of its...
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Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death
“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.” We are born into the certitude of our eventual death....
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James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” In 1989, Paris Review founding editor and...
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What Happens When We Die
“How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?” When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in...
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David Bowie Answers the Famous Proust Questionnaire
“Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? A: Living in fear.” In the 1880s, long before he claimed his status as one of the greatest authors of all time, teenage Marcel Proust (July 10,...
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C.S. Lewis on How to Structure the Days of a Creative Life and Train the...
There are, in my experience, two fundaments of the creative life: putting yourself regularly in the path of wonder and getting out of your own way in order to receive what you encounter there. Wonder,...
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Inner Space, Outer Space, and How to Be an Astronaut in the Cosmos of...
“A star is the glowing light inside the other person, distantly seen, brave soul’s tiny flame, too bright to approach without great courage and integrity.” We move among surfaces. If we are lucky...
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Orcas and the Price of Consciousness: Lessons in Love and Loss from Earth’s...
Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the...
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Bertrand Russell on the Secret of Happiness
“Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.” In my darkest hours, what has saved...
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The Weasel and the Meaning of It All: Annie Dillard on How to Live
Suppose we answer the most important question of existence in the affirmative. There is then only one question remaining: How shall we live this life? Despite all the technologies of thought and...
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Do Not Spare Yourself: An Antidote to Feeling Like You Are Waiting to Start...
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and...
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Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding...
“Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.” “To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to...
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How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking
We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions...
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J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life
In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, which he had praised in Tree and Leaf — the small,...
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The Moving Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Fossil Came Back to Life to Bring...
How an ancient survivor of the unsurvivable became a triumph of the human spirit in a divided world. Sixty million years ago, when tropical climes covered the Arctic, a small redwood species developed...
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How to Handle a Narcissistic and Abusive Parent: Kafka’s Remarkable Letter to...
“It is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.”...
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How to Speak Forest
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most passionate letter. “As a man is, so he sees.” Because we...
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Nietzsche on How to Find Yourself and the True Value of Education
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.” “Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?” Elizabeth Gilbert asked in...
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How to Fall in Love Better: A Field Guide to Enlightened Enchantment
Enchantment, J.R.R. Tolkien believed, is “as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life.” But enchantment is a story we tell ourselves that tells us...
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Emerson on How to Trust Yourself
“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.” “I felt down in my soul the clear and...
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