The Marginalian
The Marginalian

A Wonderful New Year’s Resolution from Ursula Nordstrom, Unheralded Patron Saint of Modern Childhood

History is peppered with famous resolution lists — take, for instance, those of Jonathan Swift, Susan Sontag, Marilyn Monroe, and Woody Guthrie — though we know little about how aspiration translated into actuality. But one of the most wonderful New Year’s resolutions, so heartening and yet so human, comes from legendary mid-century children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom (February 2, 1910–October 11, 1988), who brought to life such timeless classics as Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon (1947), E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952), Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), and Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree (1964).

In a January 2, 1957, letter to children’s book author Mary Stolz, found in Leonard Marcus’s magnificent Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (public library) — which also gave us Nordstrom’s witty, wise, and prescient 1953 letter on the state of publishing and the infinitely heartwarming story of how she cultivated young Sendak’s genius — Nordstrom, irreverently witty as ever, pens this beautiful aspiration, arguably the greatest resolution a human being can make:

My New Year’s resolution is to be more loving. I don’t know how it will work out as I have been quite loving up to now with some disastrous, or at least misunderstood, results. Anyhow, I will try even more love and I will let you know what happens. So far not so good. But then it is only the second day.

Ten years later, a little over a week into January, Nordstrom articulates another universal human tendency: Our exasperation over broken resolutions as we find ourselves too trapped in our old habits of mind and too swept up in the momentum of familiar behavior to actually rewire our habit loops. Nordstrom bemoans this far too common frustration in a January 11, 1967 letter to Doris K. Stotz, editor of the American Library Association’s Top of the News journal:

Do please forgive me, Miss Stotz. My New Year’s resolution was that I was going to be calm, efficient, poised, but I am starting out 1967 the same old inefficient hectic way.

And yet Nordstrom was a living testament to how it’s possible to fill the world with kindness and light and wonderful things despite this perceived “hectic inefficiency.” Perhaps she was assuring herself as much as she was advising young Maurice Sendak when she wrote to him in 1961:

That is the creative artist — a penalty of the creative artist — wanting to make order out of chaos. The rest of us plain people just accept disorder (if we even recognize it) and get a bang out of our five beautiful senses, if we’re lucky.

For isn’t this the most we can ever aspire to do, whether as a formal resolution or as an everyday intention?


Published January 2, 2014

https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/02/ursula-nordstrom-new-years-resolutions/

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