Sunday newsletter

Brain Pickings has a free Sunday digest of the week’s most interesting 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 is an illustration. Like? Claim yours:

midweek newsletter

Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its twelfth year and I have decided to plunge into 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. Contribute to this midweek that is free for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from the standard Sunday digest of brand new pieces:

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

A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca regarding 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 in addition to Culture-Shifting Courage to speak Truth that is inconvenient to

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 also the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility

The Science of Stress and exactly how Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease

Mary Oliver on What www.professionalresumesolutions.com Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy on her behalf 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 when you look at the Art of Being Alone

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

Related Reads

Annie Dillard regarding the Art of the Essay in addition to 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 regarding the Mind: Remembering Oliver Sacks

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

“Only an individual who is congenitally self-centered gets the effrontery as well as the stamina to write essays,” E.B. White wrote into 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 while the memory of a people” and “chew over our public past.” Although he previously never written an essay himself, the advice Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Frost (March 26, 1874–January 29, 1963) provided to his eldest daughter, Lesley, not merely stands as an apt mediator between White and Dillard but also probably the most enduring wisdom on essay-writing ever committed to paper.

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 an impressive 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 the particular predicament, emanating general wisdom on writing, the art of the essay, as well as thinking itself.

5 years before he received the very first of his four Pulitzer Prizes, 45-year-old Frost writes:

I pity you, needing to write essays where the imagination doesn’t have chance, or close to no chance. Just one single word of advice: stay away from strain or at any rate the appearance of strain. One way to head to work is to read your author a couple of times over having an eye out for anything that develops for you as you read whether appreciative contradictory corroborative or parallel…

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

There must be pretty much of a jumble in your head or on the note paper following the time that is first even with the next. Much that you shall think of in connection will come to nothing and be wasted. However some of it ought to go together under one idea. That idea could be the thing to write on and write in to the title during the head of your paper… One idea and a few subordinate ideas — the trick is to have those happen to you as you read and catch them — not allow them to escape you… The sidelong glance is exactly what you rely on. You look at your author but you keep consitently the tail of your eye on what is occurring in addition to your author in your mind that is own and.

Reflecting on his days as an English teacher at New Hampshire’s Pinkerton Academy, Frost points to precisely this quality that is over-and-above the component that set apart the few of his students who mastered the essay from the vast majority of these who never did. (Although by the time of his tenure the Academy officially accepted young women, Frost’s passing remark that his class consisted of sixty boys reveals a great deal about women’s plight for education.) He writes: