Tag: Books

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn23 Comments

I made a brief visit to see my parents…My father was in the backyard feeding the birds. I hesitated to disturb him but felt an urgency to see him and quietly slipped out back. He was standing at the end of the yard with his back toward me with arms outstretched. As I stood in silence the birds flew to him and covered him, as if a fresco from the painter Giotto’s life cycle of St. Francis of Assisi. I could feel the birds’ affection for him, not merely because he fed them, but because they were responding to his innate goodness. At that moment I had no doubt that he was of a hallowed tribe. Not a perfect man, nor had he produced any known miracle, yet he had the simplicity of a saint, and I the saint’s errant daughter. Somehow sensing my presence, he turned as the birds flew above him and looked at me. Hello doll, he said. Hello, Daddy, I answered.

— Patti Smith, Bread of Angels: A Memoir (Random House, November 4, 2025)

Notes:

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn5 Comments

EK: So what does art do? Why do we like it?

BE: One of the things that happen when you are looking at art or listening to art — something connects to you, and you think, “That’s what I really like. That’s what really moves me.” … I think some of the worst writing in the world is writing about fine art, and it ought to be much simpler. One of the reasons you like it is that it doesn’t translate into words. It doesn’t turn into sentences. It hits you in some other place, some other part of your mind. […]

EK: I always think about that as being on an album called “Music for Airports” because that is both very discordant and, as I thought about it more, exactly correct. That is, to me, one of the holiest pieces of music I have ever heard. And in a way, it gets to something true about airports, which is that this is a place where human beings go to fly, where they’re forced into — I mean, I feel this when I get on planes — a confrontation with their own mortality. There’s never a time when I’m in a plane that is having turbulence during takeoff when I don’t think — in a way I usually do not think in my day — “I could die.” There are all these people, they’re going to places that are, in many cases, incredibly important to them, and the airport is this extraordinary combination of a place that is so banal — lines, and you’re waiting in line for food that is mediocre, at best, and you’re late, and your plane is late, and you’re annoyed. And then it’s also the absolute most remarkable place that a human being can possibly find themselves — something that, for most of human history, was completely unimaginable. “2/1” on “Music for Airports,” to me, is such a perfect song because it’s more true about the airport than my experience of the airport is.

BE: [Laughs.] That’s a nice way of putting it. I wanted to make flying feel like a more spiritual experience, if I had to put it into a sentence with a controversial word in it. And by that I mean I used to be very frightened of flying, and of course, I had to do it at that time in my career.

But I thought: What if you could make a kind of music that made you less worried about the idea of dying? What if you could make a piece of music that made your life seem less the center of your attention? If you could see yourself as just being one atom in a universe of complicated molecules, would that make things feel better?

— Brian Eno interviewed by Ezra Klein, from “A Breath of Fresh Air with Brian Eno” (NY Times, October 3, 2025. The Ezra Klein Show)

5:00 PM Bell!

Live & Learn20 Comments

From here she could see a whole teeming mass…running about the city like ants, all dedicated to the same pointless task. She stepped back. It felt good to escape above, free of the noise… “It’s lovely here,” she said.”

Go now. Find your peace… Let your mind wander. Skim like a dragonfly over the pool of your consciousness and let go… you can quiet your mind.

— R.F. Kuang, Katabasis: A Novel (William Morrow, August 26, 2025)

Notes:

If we lose reading, we lose…

Live & Learn26 Comments

…These are darkening days for those of us who love books. But we needn’t drift apathetically into a horror story. The English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote of beauty that it is “vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter.” Well, that’s true of reading. It is vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter. We are on our phones.

Like characters in a scary story, we need to see that we are drifting toward disaster and save ourselves, before it’s too late. Each of us has the power to show that reading does matter. We can do it by reading—and being seen reading—with dedication, bravado and a bit of countercultural aggression. Be the person on the train who pulls out a paperback rather than a phone. Be the parent in the pediatrician’s waiting room who reads a story rather than letting your child zone out on a tablet. Be the spouse who chooses a novel after dinner over the television. Be the teacher who transfixes the class with a live reading rather than a canned video. Revive the old social norms by setting them yourself…

Poetry and literature are art forms that can lift a person from blinkered individual existence to sublime and broadened understanding. Books form a great reverberating conversation across the centuries, joining the minds of men and women long dead with those alive today. If we lose reading, we lose the connection, and we consign future generations to a kind of witless groping around in cultural obscurity. It is vital, though, to recognize where we are now. English majors are struggling to read Dickens. If we let this slide, in a decade we’ll be lucky if graduate students can parse “Fun with Dick and Jane.”

— Meghan Cox Gurdon, from “Put Down the Phone and Pull Out a Book, Revel in words and writing. Let the world see you doing it.” (wsj.com, July 22, 2025)

Beauty — finding it, making it…

Live & Learn14 Comments

But like all utopian visions, theirs had its contradictions. They’d sold all their belongings to build a boat. They were abandoning everyone they knew to live afloat, alone, unshackled from obligation and community, from all the things that bind a person to a place or its people, from the day-to-day indignities of ordinary life and the unseen rules whose weight perhaps you feel only in the place you were raised. After all, what is more self-interested than running away?

— Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (Riverhead Books, July 8, 2025)

Notes:

  • One of the best books I have ever read. Highly recommended.
  • NY Times Book Review: “Stranded at Sea, Would Their Marriage Survive? A Marriage at Sea” tells the stranger-than-fiction story of one couple who traded their lives for the ocean — and almost lost them.”
    • “Beauty — finding it, making it — has always been an act of defiance against despair. In Elmhirst’s delicate, humane depiction of the couple, her choice of narrative framing, her pacing and her compassion, she renders “A Marriage at Sea” an act of beauty in its own right. I found myself, alternately, holding my breath as I read at top speed, wandering rooms in search of someone to read aloud to, and placing the book facedown, arrested by quiet statements that left me reeling with their depth.” — Blair Braverman.
  • Sophie Elmhirst official website.