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Actuality vs. Possibility and How to Hear the Signal of Your Life
Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion dead stars whose signal light is only now reaching us, I found myself trembling with the parallel to life itself: The great…
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The Canon of Solitude: 200 Years of Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Fertile Aloneness
There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In…
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The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on How to Grow Old and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart
“If you can fall in love again and again… if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.” “On how one orients himself to the moment,” 48-year-old Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) wrote in reflecting on the art…
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How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking
We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions more plainly than our promises. False promises — those people make not intending to keep — are easier to comprehend, for they…
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