Sunday newsletter
Brain Pickings has a totally free Sunday digest of the week’s most interesting and articles that are inspiring art, science, philosophy, creativity, children’s books, and other strands of your seek out truth, beauty, and meaning. Here is an essay service example. Like? Claim yours:
midweek newsletter
Also: Because Brain Pickings is within 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. Subscribe to this free midweek pick-me-up for heart, mind, and spirit below — it is separate from 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 Regarding 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 regarding the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on coping with Turbulent Times
A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Ant >
The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and being > that is unafra
10 Learnings from 10 Years 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 plus 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 Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy on her true love
Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really opportinity 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 on the creative art of the Essay plus the Different Responsibilities of Narrative Nonfiction, Poetry, and Short Stories
Ted Hughes on the best way to Be a Writer: A Letter of Advice to His 18-Year-Old Daughter
W.E.B. Dubois on Earning One’s Privilege: his letter that is magnificent of to His Teenage Daughter
Famous Writers’ Sleep Habits vs. Literary Productivity, Visualized
7 Life-Learnings from 7 many 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 someone who is congenitally self-centered gets the effrontery in addition to stamina to publish essays,” E.B. White wrote when you look at 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 whilst 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) offered to his eldest daughter, Lesley, not merely stands as an apt mediator between White and Dillard but also several of the most enduring wisdom on essay-writing ever focused on paper.
During her junior year in college, Lesley shared her exasperation over having been assigned to create an essay that is academic 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 behalf particular predicament, emanating general wisdom on writing, the art of the essay, as well as thinking itself.
5 years before he received the initial of his four Pulitzer Prizes, 45-year-old Frost writes:
I pity you, needing to write essays where no chance is had by the imagination, or next to no chance. Just one single word of advice: stay away from strain or at any rate the look of strain. One way to head to tasks are to read through your author a few times over having an eye out for anything that develops to you personally while you read whether appreciative contradictory corroborative or parallel…
He speaks to your notion that writing, as with any creativity, is a question 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 just about of a jumble in your thoughts or in your note paper following the time that is first even after the second. Much that you will think of in connection will come to nothing and be wasted. Many from 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 happen to you while you read and catch them — not let them escape you… The sidelong glance is really what you be determined by. You look at your author however you keep consitently the tail of one’s eye about what is going on over and above 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 number of his students who mastered the essay through the great majority of these who never did. (Although because of the period of his tenure the Academy officially accepted young women, Frost’s passing remark that his class consisted of sixty boys reveals a good deal about women’s plight for education.) He writes: