A Beautiful 1928 Letter to 16-Year-Old Jackson Pollock from His Dad

“The secret of success is… to be fully awake to everything about you.”

As a lover of letters and famous correspondence, I was thrilled to stumble across this 1928 letter from Jackson Pollock’s dad, LeRoy, to his son, uncovered by our very own Michelle Legro in the “Family” issue of the always-excellent Lapham’s Quarterly. Culled from American Letters 1927-1947: Jackson Pollock & Family, the letter is a beautiful paean to what matters most in life, and how to cultivate it.

Well Jack I was glad to learn how you felt about your summer’s work & your coming school year. The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life.”

Full text below, courtesy of Lapham’s Quarterly:

Dear Son Jack,

Well it has been some time since I received your fine letter. It makes me a bit proud and swelled up to get letters from five young fellows by the names of Charles, Mart, Frank, Sande, and Jack. The letters are so full of life, interest, ambition, and good fellowship. It fills my old heart with gladness and makes me feel ‘Bully.’ Well Jack I was glad to learn how you felt about your summer’s work & your coming school year. The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life. I do not think a young fellow should be too serious, he should be full of the Dickens some times to create a balance.

I think your philosophy on religion is okay. I think every person should think, act & believe according to the dictates of his own conscience without too much pressure from the outside. I too think there is a higher power, a supreme force, a governor, a something that controls the universe. What it is & in what form I do not know. It may be that our intellect or spirit exists in space in some other form after it parts from this body. Nothing is impossible and we know that nothing is destroyed, it only changes chemically. We burn up a house and its contents, we change the form but the same elements exist; gas, vapor, ashes. They are all there just the same.

I had a couple of letters from mother the other day, one written the twelfth and one the fifteenth. Am always glad to get letters from your mother, she is a Dear isn’t she? Your mother and I have been a complete failure financially but if the boys turn out to be good and useful citizens nothing else matters and we know this is happening so why not be jubilant?

The weather up here couldn’t be beat, but I suppose it won’t last always, in fact we are looking forward to some snowstorms and an excuse to come back to the orange belt. I do not know anything about what I will do or if I will have a job when I leave here, but I am not worrying about it because it is no use to worry about what you can’t help, or what you can help, moral ‘don’t worry.’

Write and tell me all about your schoolwork and yourself in general. I will appreciate your confidence.

You no doubt had some hard days on your job at Crestline this summer. I can imagine the steep climbing, the hot weather, etc. But those hard things are what builds character and physic. Well Jack I presume by the time you have read all this you will be mentally fatigued and will need to relax. So goodnight, pleasant dreams and God bless you.

Your affectionate Dad

Find more everyday poetics in the fantastic collection of letters, from which this gem came.

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Pasta by Design: Finding Whimsy in the Geometry of Food

Phylogeny of the pantry, or what architecture has to do with anellini.

In 2010, London chef extraordinaire Jacob Kenedy with award-winning British graphic designer Caz Hildebrand explored the geometry of pasta — a journey into the science, history, and philosophy of Italy’s most iconic pasta dishes through a minimalist, design-driven cookbook. Now comes Pasta by Design, an even more ambitious design dissection on the beloved carb staple, exploring the intricate, beautiful, almost whimsical geometrical shapes of more than 90 different types of pasta.

(After all, if geometry is good enough a lens for love, it’s certainly good enough for pasta.)

Pasta, it turns out, is a surprisingly apt vehicle for the elements of great design. MoMA’s Paola Antonelli (♥) writes in the introduction:

Pasta, that simple and yet surprisingly versatile mixture of durum wheat-flour and water, shaped by hand or machine, is a delicious example of great design. Just like any other indispensable invention, pasta matches the available resources (wheat — one of the most widely produced cereals in the world) with goals (the human need not only to eat, but also to have a somewhat diversified diet). As well as being a design born out of necessity, it is also such a simple and strong concept that it has generated an almost endless variety of derivative pasta types — and an even greater number of dishes made from them. Moreover, it has proven to be a timeless design; although pasta’s production tools may have been updated across the centuries, its basic forms have remained the same. It is also a global design, easy to appropriate and adapt to local culture — as can be seen from the many regional varieties of pasta dishes across the world. Finally, pasta is a universal success with both critics and the public, thus also passing the market-driven design test.”

Given the astounding variety of pasta types and the often confusing nomenclature of their classification, the book takes an approach inspired by the science of phylogeny — the study of relatedness between groups of forms in nature — to pare down 92 different types based on their morphological features, then charts them in a family tree.

Each shape is described in a meticulous mathematical formula, and expressive minimalist photographs and drawings zoom in on the hidden genius of the classic pantry mainstay.

Quirky in spirit yet rigorously researched and beautifully produced, Pasta by Design at once humanizes mathematics and exposes the captivating complexity of one of the world’s most beloved foods, revealing the dimensionality of design as a cross-disciplinary cultural lens.

Images courtesy of Thames & Hudson; photographs via IJP

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How Mankind Conquered the Night and Created the 24-Hour Day

What the world’s oldest profession has to do with light pollution.

Why do we need darkness? The twentieth century has at last triumphed over this frightening, lawless place. Night was once a time for thieves and highwaymen, grave-diggers, ghosts, and masked balls. Now it’s a place of bright lights, illuminating every part of the city. According to one of the characters in Hemingway’s story of the same name: “He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing.” And Edward Gorey had his own explanation.

The City Dark, a new documentary by King Corn writer Ian Cheney, looks at the light-filled world we have created in the past hundred years or so. Humans of the twenty-first century have grown accustomed to living twenty-four hour lives, and without the night sky above us, it’s easy to forget our own place in the cosmos. (Astronomer Thomas Hockey’s recent book How We See the Sky is a revolutionary call for a return to stargazing.)

Over the past few years, there have been several wonderful books on the history of night, including Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, and Craig Koslofsky’s Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe. The academic interest in night doesn’t seem incidental: night is now something for the history books, an antique notion of a dark age.

As it turns out, the world’s oldest profession isn’t prostitution, but nightwatching. A night patrol in fifth century Rome was expected to be “the security of those who are sleeping, the protection of houses, guardian of the gates, an unseen examiner and silent judge.”

The Night Watch, by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1642.

There was quite a bit to be wary of: foreign armies, thieves, and most frightening of all, fire. More destructive than any crime, and cheap to inflict on others, massive fires could be an accident of a headscarf catching on a candle or a unruly stove in a bakehouse, as it was at the beginning of the Great Fire of London in 1666, which destroyed four-fifths of the city in four days.

The gate of western London explodes in the Great Fire, Old St. Paul's is to the right.

In a pre-industrial society, work that wasn’t finished during the day simply had to be finished at night: farmers plowed into darkness, weavers worked by candlelight, shoemakers might stay up until midnight or later to meet demand. The dead were also moved at night, their graves dug; the rag-pickers collected garbage; the dust men collected the day’s ashes.

The Dentist, by Gerrit van Honhorst, 1622.

If light was God, than darkness was surely Satan, and the night was the closest to an early Hell. Demons could come to you in dreams, but also on the road or in the woods. “Never greet a stranger in the night,” says the Talmud, “for he may be a demon.”

But terrors of the night also contained the calm of reason. The moon could be measured and mapped as it traveled through the sky, the constellations named, the planets divided from the stars, all of which was useful for farmers, sailors, scientists, and even poets to understand their place in the universe. When he looked at the night sky, Goethe wrote, he was “overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space.”

The telescope of Caroline and her brother William Herschel, who was the first astronomer to spot Uranus.

By studying the night sky for centuries, we learned of the other planets and our place in the solar system, and we set out to order the heavens. With enormous telescopes, Enlightenment-era astronomers like Caroline Herschel would sweep the sky nightly for comets, meteors and changes in the constellations. It was this kind of study, explained Carl Sagan in Cosmos, that “has led directly to our modern global civilization.”

Both The City Dark and these histories of night are reminders that for thousands of years humans have lived by a natural rhythm of night and day that has only recently been broken. By banishing the night, we have extended the hours in the day that we can work and play. We’ve given in to the urgent human desire to live more, but also to live more inwardly, turned away from the night sky. It’s a change that promises to be subtle, unseen, and profoundly lasting on the next thousand years of human life.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

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