Zadie Smith wrote in her spectacular essay on optimism and despair.
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Tag: Book Reviews
How to Make Difficult Decisions: Benjamin Franklin’s Pioneering Pros and Cons Framework
When the 29-year-old Charles Darwin made his endearing list of the pros and cons of marriage, he was applying a now common decision-making technique pioneered half a century earlier by another revolutionary mind on the other side of the Atlantic: America’s polymathic Founding Father Benjamin Frank
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Cosmic Consolation for Human Hardship: The Great Naturalist John Burroughs on How to Live with Life
In those seasons of being when life boughs you down low with world-weariness, when the sun of your soul is collapsing into a black hole, when you despair of humanity’s twin capacity for inhumanity and are no longer able to hold without heartache Maya Angelou’s eternal observation that we are cre
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Our Need for Each Other and Our Need for Our Selves: Muriel Rukeyser on the Root of Strength in Times of Crisis
“My one reader, you reading this book, who are you?” Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) asks with the large forthright eyes of her words in one of the most beautiful and penetrating books ever written on any subject.
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The Fragile Species: A Forgotten Masterpiece of Perspective on How to Live with Ourselves and Each Other
When Earth first erupted with color, flowers took over so suddenly and completely that, two hundred million years later, the baffled Darwin called this blooming conquest an “abominable mystery.
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Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All
“Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb early work on love and loss. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.
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Nina Simone’s Gum and the Shimmering Strangeness of How Art Casts Its Transcendent Spell on Us
“Time is a dictator, as we know it,” Nina Simone (February 21, 1933–April 21, 2003) observed in her soulful 1969 meditation on time. “Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive?”
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The Backdoor to Immortality: Marguerite Duras on What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death
“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote as she weighed what gives meaning to our mortal lives in a stunning poem — one of the hundreds that outlived her as she returned her borrowed stardust to the universe at ninety-six.
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We Grow Accustomed to the Dark: Emily Dickinson’s Stunning Ode to Resilience, Animated
How do we survive the unsurvivable? What is that inextinguishable flame that goes on flickering in the bleak, dark chamber of our being when something of vital importance has been lost? “All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched,” Seneca’s timeless
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Aloneness, Belonging, and the Paradox of Vulnerability, in Love and Creative Work
If we are not at least a little abashed by the people we used to be, the voyage of life has halted in the windless bay of complacency.
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Front Porch Reflections 
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