Brain Pickings has a totally free Sunday digest of the week’s most fascinating and articles that are inspiring art

Sunday newsletter

Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week’s most fascinating and articles that are inspiring art, science, philosophy, creativity, children’s books, as well as other strands of our search for truth, beauty, and meaning. Here’s a good example. Like? Claim yours:

midweek newsletter

Also: Because Brain Pickings is within its twelfth year and I have decided to plunge into what is 123helpme 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. Sign up for this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate through the standard Sunday digest of the latest pieces:

The greater amount of Loving One: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads W.H. Auden’s Sublime Ode to the 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 Exactly 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 of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times

A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca in the Ant >

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and being > that is unafra

10 Learnings from a decade of Brain Pickings

The Writing of “Silent Spring”: Rachel Carson additionally the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power

Timeless Suggestions About Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers

A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s Rare Conversation on Forgiveness and 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 true love

Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change

The Lonely City: Adventures into the creative art of Being Alone

Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives

Related Reads

Annie Dillard from the Art associated with Essay and the Different Responsibilities of Narrative Nonfiction, Poetry, and Short Stories

Ted Hughes about how to Be a Writer: A Letter of Advice to His 18-Year-Old Daughter

W.E.B. Dubois on Earning One’s Privilege: His Magnificent Letter of Advice 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 this Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks

Simple tips to Read Intelligently and Write a Great Essay: Robert Frost’s Letter of Advice to His Young Daughter

“Only someone who is congenitally self-centered has got the effrontery additionally the stamina to create essays,” E.B. White wrote within the foreword to his collected essays. Annie Dillard sees things almost the way that is opposite insisting that essayists perform a public service — they “serve as the 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 create an academic essay about a book she didn’t find particularly inspiring. In a magnificent letter from February of 1919, present in The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1 (public library), the beloved poet gave his daughter sage counsel on her 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 the imagination has no chance, or next to no chance. Just one single word of advice: Try to avoid strain or at any rate the look of strain. One way to go to tasks are to read through your author a few times over having an eye out for anything that occurs for you as you read whether appreciative contradictory corroborative or parallel…

He speaks to the notion that writing, as with any creativity, is a matter of selecting the few thrilling ideas from the large amount of dull ones that occur to us — “To invent… is always to choose,” as French polymath Henri Poincarй famously proclaimed. Frost counsels:

There ought to be more or less of a jumble in your thoughts or on the note paper after the first time and even with the 2nd. Much that you shall think about in connection can come to nothing and be wasted. However some of it need to go together under one idea. That idea could be the thing to write on and write 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 as you read and catch them — not allow them to escape you… The sidelong glance is what you be determined by. You look at your author you keep consitently the tail of the eye on which is happening in addition to your author in your own mind and nature.

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 component that set apart the handful of his students who mastered the essay through the the greater part of the who never did. (Although because of the time of his tenure the Academy officially accepted young women, Frost’s passing remark that his class consisted of sixty boys reveals a tremendous amount about women’s plight for education.) He writes: