Newsletter sunday
Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week’s most interesting and inspiring articles across art, science, philosophy, creativity, children’s books, and other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Listed here is an illustration. Like? Claim yours:
midweek newsletter
Also: Because Brain Pickings is within its twelfth year and I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character. Contribute to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it really is separate from the standard Sunday digest of new pieces:
The More Loving One: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads W.H. Auden’s Sublime Ode to Our Unrequited Love for the Universe
Favorite Books of 2018
Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert
Rebecca Solnit’s Lovely Letter to Children About How Books Solace, Empower, and Transform Us
A Brave and Startling Truth: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Maya Angelou’s Stunning Humanist Poem That Flew to Space, Inspired by Carl Sagan
In Praise regarding the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on coping with Turbulent Times
A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Ant >
The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafra >
10 Learnings from ten years of Brain Pickings
The Writing of “Silent Spring”: Rachel Carson as well as the Culture-Shifting Courage to speak Truth that is inconvenient to
Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers
A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s Rare Conversation on Forgiveness while the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility
The Science of Stress and just how Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease
Mary Oliver on which Attention Really Means and Elegy that is her moving for Soul Mate
Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really opportinity for Movements of Social Change
The Lonely City: Adventures within the Art to be Alone
Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives
Related Reads
Annie Dillard from the Art regarding the Essay plus the Different Responsibilities of Narrative Nonfiction, Poetry, and Short Stories
Ted Hughes on how best to Be a Writer: A Letter of Advice to His 18-Year-Old Daughter
W.E.B. Dubois on Earning One’s Privilege: his letter that is magnificent of to His Teenage Daughter
Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized
7 Life-Learnings from 7 Years of Brain Pickings, Illustrated
Anaпs Nin on Love, Hand-Lettered by Debbie Millman
Anaпs Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman
Susan Sontag on Love: Illustrated Diary Excerpts
Susan Sontag on Art: Illustrated Diary Excerpts
Albert Camus on Happiness and Love, Illustrated by Wendy MacNaughton
The Holstee Manifesto
The Silent Music of the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks
How exactly to Read Intelligently and Write a Great Essay: Robert Frost’s Letter of Advice to His Young Daughter
“Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has got the effrontery and also the stamina to publish essays,” E.B. White wrote into the foreword to his collected essays. Annie Dillard sees things almost the opposite way, insisting paper writer that essayists perform a public service — they “serve given that memory of a people” and “chew over our public past.” Himself, the advice Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Frost (March 26, 1874–January 29, 1963) offered to his eldest daughter, Lesley, not only stands as an apt mediator between White and Dillard but also some of the most enduring wisdom on essay-writing ever committed to paper although he had never written an essay.
During her junior year in college, Lesley shared her exasperation over having been assigned to write an academic essay about a book she didn’t find particularly inspiring. In an impressive letter from February of 1919, found in The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1 (public library), the beloved poet gave his daughter sage counsel on her behalf particular predicament, emanating general wisdom on writing, the skill of the essay, and even thinking itself.
Five years before he received the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes, 45-year-old Frost writes:
I pity you, being forced to write essays where no chance is had by the imagination, or next to no chance. Just one word of advice: stay away from strain or at any rate the appearance of strain. One method to head to work is to read through your author a few times over having an eye out for anything that occurs to you personally as you read whether appreciative contradictory corroborative or parallel…
He speaks towards the notion that writing, like all creativity, is a matter of selecting the few thrilling ideas from the lot of dull ones that occur to us — “To invent… is always to choose,” as French polymath Henri Poincarй famously proclaimed. Frost counsels:
There must be pretty much of a jumble in your thoughts or in your note paper after the very first time and even with the second. Much that you will think about in connection should come to nothing and get wasted. But some from it ought to go together under one idea. That idea could be the thing to write on and write in to the title during the head of your paper… One idea and a few subordinate ideas — the trick is to have those occur to you while you read and catch them — not allow them to escape you… The sidelong glance is what you rely on. You appear at your author you keep carefully the tail of the eye on which is going on over and above your author in your mind that is own and.
Reflecting on his days as an English teacher at New Hampshire’s Pinkerton Academy, Frost points to precisely this over-and-above quality as the factor that set apart the handful of his students who mastered the essay from the the greater part of those who never did. (Although by the time of his tenure the Academy officially accepted young women, Frost’s passing remark that his class consisted of sixty boys reveals a whole lot about women’s plight for education.) He writes: