In Defense of the Fluid Self: Why Anaïs Nin Turned Down a Harper’s Bazaar Profile
by Maria Popova “I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing.” Celebrated diarist Anaïs Nin has been on heavy rotation here this year, but it is only because her daily private reflections reverberate with timeless, universal resonance.
10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent
by Maria Popova “Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.” Buried in various corners of the web is a beautiful and poignant list titled Some Rules for Students and Teachers, attributed to John Cage, who passed away twenty years ago this week.
Write A Book Masterclass
Taught by Dr. Angela, The Author Incubator REAL RESULTS: Dr.
Anaïs Nin on Embracing the Unfamiliar
by Maria Popova “It is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar.” We’ve already seen that life is about living the questions, that the unknown is what drives science, and that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.
Consciousness is Not a Computation
In the previous article in this series, Is The Universe a Computer? New Evidence Emerges I wrote about some new evidence that appears to suggest that the universe may be like a computer, or least that it contains computer codes of a sort. But while this evidence is fascinating, I don’t believe that ultimately the universe is in fact a computer.
Anaïs Nin on Real Love, Illustrated by Debbie Millman
by Maria Popova “Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.” To celebrate beloved author and dedicated diarist Anaïs Nin, here is the second installment in my ongoing collaboration with author, artist, philosopher, design interviewer extraordinaire Debbie Millman, based on a 1941 entry from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944 (public library).
Wisdom from a MacArthur Genius: Psychologist Angela Duckworth on Why Grit, Not IQ, Predicts Success
by Maria Popova “Character is at least as important as intellect.” Creative history brims with embodied examples of why the secret of genius is doggedness rather than “god”-given talent, from the case of young Mozart’s upbringing to E. B. White’s wisdom on writing to Chuck Close’s assertion about art to Tchaikovsky’s conviction about composition to Neil Gaiman’s advice to aspiring writers.
What Makes a Great City: Anaïs Nin on the Poetics of New York
by Maria Popova “Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power.” This week, I’m in Malmö, Sweden, where I’m opening a session on cities at The Conference. In pondering the question of what makes for a thriving city brimming with robust public life, I was reminded of a passage from a letter Anaïs Nin wrote to her lover Henry Miller, found in the sublime A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953 (public library) — a tome you might recall from recent literary jukebox installments.
Marginalia and the Yin-Yang of Reading and Writing
by Maria Popova The bibliophile’s property rights, or why the osmosis of agreement and disagreement belongs in a book’s margins. The acts of reading and writing have always been intertwined, a kind of fundamental yin-yang of how ideas travel and permeate minds.
The Greatest Books of All Time, As Voted by 125 Famous Authors
“Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work,” Jennifer Egan once said. This intersection of reading and writing is both a necessary bi-directional life skill for us mere mortals and a secret of iconic writers’ success, as bespoken by their personal libraries. The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books asks 125 of modernity’s greatest British and American writers — including Norman Mailer, Ann Patchett, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud, and Joyce Carol Oates — “to provide a list, ranked, in order, of what [they] consider the ten greatest works of fiction of all time– novels, story collections, plays, or poems.” Of the 544 separate titles selected, each is assigned a reverse-order point value based on the number position at which it appears on any list — so, a book that tops a list at number one receives 10 points, and a book that graces the bottom, at number ten, receives 1 point. In introducing the lists, David Orr offers a litmus test for greatness:
How the Invention of the Alphabet Usurped Female Power in Society and Sparked the Rise of Patriarchy in Human Culture
by Maria Popova A brief history of gender dynamics from page to screen. The Rosetta Stone may be one of the 100 diagrams that changed the world and language may have propelled our evolution, but the invention of the written word was not without its costs. As Sophocles wisely observed, “nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” That curse is what Leonard Shlain explores in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image (public library) — a pause-giving look at the relationship between literacy and patriarchy. Without denying the vastness of the benefits literacy bestowed upon humanity, Shlain uses Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum — “the medium is the message” — to examine how the advent of the written word and our ability to read reconfigured the human brain, effecting profound changes in the cultural dynamics of gender roles.
In Pursuit of the Extraordinary: Anaïs Nin Reads from Her Famous Diaries
by Maria Popova “Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. … I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist.” I often say that the answer to every existential question can be found in the journals of Anaïs Nin, one of the most dedicated diarists in modern literary history — her sixteen tomes of published journals, spanning more than half a century between the time she began writing at the age of eleven and her death, are a treasure trove of insight on love, literature, and human nature. In this rare recording from 1966, digitized thanks to a grant from National Endowment for the Arts and contributions by Pacifica Radio listeners, Nin reads from the first volume, though The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947 (public library) remains the best in the series — the same gem that gave us Nin on the meaning of life, how our objects define us, why emotional excess is essential to creativity, and how inviting the unknown helps us live more richly.
