Reads tagged with “culture”
John Cheever on the Pain of Loneliness and How It Feeds the Beauty and Creative Restlessness of Youth
“A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.”
Sleep Demons: Bill Hayes on REM, the Poetics of Yawns, and Maurice Sendak’s Antidote to Insomnia
“Sleep acts … more like an emotion than a bodily function. As with desire, it resists pursuit. Sleep must come find you.”
Denise Levertov on Making Art Amid Chaos and the Artist’s Task to Awaken Society’s Sleepers
“I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”
Trailblazing 18th-Century Mathematician Émilie du Châtelet, Who Popularized Newton, on Gender in Science and the Nature of Genius
“One must know what one wants to be. In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.”
Adrienne Rich Reads “What Kind of Times Are These”
“In times like these to have you listen at all, it’s necessary to talk about trees.”
Legendary Anthropologist Margaret Mead on Work, Leisure, and Creativity
“If we make one criterion for defining the artist… the impulse to make something new… — a kind of divine discontent with all that has gone before, however good — then we can find such artists at every level of human culture, even when performing acts of great simplicity.”
Simone de Beauvoir on How Chance and Choice Converge to Make Us Who We Are
“My life… runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment.”
Poet and Philosopher John O’Donohue on Selfhood, the Crucible of Identity, and What Makes Life’s Transience Bearable
“It is crucial to understand that experience itself is not merely an empirical process of appropriating or digesting blocks of life. Experience is rather a journey of transfiguration. Both that which is lived and the one who lives it are transfigured.”
Marcus Aurelius on How to Motivate Yourself to Get Out of Bed in the Morning and Go to Work
“You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.”
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