Tennessee Williams on love, James {NAME} on what it really means to grow up, and a lovey illustrated invitation to living with presence 

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](NAME}-tiny-perfect-things?e=729b5d7c3e). If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( — it's free. Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [Brain Pickings]( [Welcome] Hello, {NAME}! This is the [brainpickings.org]( weekly digest by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Walt Whitman on democracy and our mightiest force of resistance, Martin Buber on love and what it really means to live in the present, and more" — you can catch up [right here](. And if you're enjoying this newsletter, please consider supporting my labor of love with a [donation]( – each month, I spend hundreds of hours and tremendous resources on it, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [Tennessee Williams on Love and How the Very Thing Worth Saving Is the Thing That Will Save Us]( “Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills,” Tolstoy wrote at the end of his life in his forgotten correspondence with Gandhi about [human nature and why we hurt each other]( as the global tensions that would soon erupt into World War I were building. How love can save us and what exactly it saves us from — each other, ourselves, the maelstrom of our intersubjective suffering — are questions each person and each generation must answer for themselves. Tennessee Williams (March 26, 1911–February 25, 1983), born several months after Tolstoy’s death, addressed this abiding question with uncommonly poetic precision several months before his own death in a 1982 conversation with James Grissom, who would spend three decades synthesizing his interviews with, research on, and insight into the beloved playwright in [Follies of God: Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog]( (public library). Tennessee Williams (Photograph: John Springer) A quarter century after Martin Luther King, Jr. made his impassioned case for [reviving the ancient Greek concept of agape]( Williams reflects: The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love. Complement with Jeanette Winterson on [how art saves us]( and Elizabeth Alexander on [the ethic of love]( then revisit Williams’s [conversation with William S. Burroughs about writing and death]( and his [stirring reading of two poems by Hart Crane](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook](NAME}-tiny-perfect-things?fblike=fblike-268a784f&e=729b5d7c3e&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3Dfbaed38c5c%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F07%252F30%252Ftennessee-williams-love%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F07%252F30...) donating=loving Each week of the past eleven years, I have poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider supporting my labor of love with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( [Tiny, Perfect Things: A Lyrical Illustrated Invitation to Presence]( “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” pioneering psychologist William James declaimed in the final years of the nineteenth century as he considered [how attention shapes human life](. At the dawn of the following century, Hermann Hesse offered in his increasingly timely manifesto for [savoring life’s little joys as the portal to living with presence]( “My advice to the person suffering from lack of time and from apathy is this: Seek out each day as many as possible of the small joys.” His was a world without radio, television, or the Internet, predating the golden age of consumerism — a time we can now barely conceive of, before busyness and distraction became the governing law of every waking hour. And yet, even from his inconceivable vantage point, Hesse could foresee the direction in which humanity was headed — toward habitual flight from presence and accelerating grandomania. A century on, poet M.H. Clark and artist [Madeline Kloepper]( offer a mighty antidote to our inattentive apathy in [Tiny, Perfect Things]( ([public library]( — a lyrical invitation to apprehend the small wonders that strew the everyday: the yellow leaf blown to the ground, the smiling face of a neighbor, the spider laboring at her web, the red feather in a passerby’s hat, the snail triumphant atop the fence, the pale, luminous moon against the nocturne. Radiating from a young girl’s vibrantly illustrated neighborhood walk with her grandfather is a lovely embodiment of Henry Beston’s insistence that [“in the emotional world a small thing can touch the heart and the imagination every bit as much as something impressively gigantic.”]( Complement [Tiny, Perfect Things]( with [Be Still, Life]( — a songlike illustrated invitation to living with presence — and [Sidewalk Flowers]( then revisit Annie Dillard on [choosing presence over productivity]( and cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz on [learning to see the wonder in our everyday reality](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook](NAME}-tiny-perfect-things?fblike=fblike-ae469889&e=729b5d7c3e&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3Dfbaed38c5c%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F08%252F01%252Ftiny-perfect-things-clark-kloepper%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F08%252F01...) [James {NAME} on Resisting the Mindless Majority, Not Running from Uncomfortable Realities, and What It Really Means to Grow Up]( “I can conceive of no better service,” Walt Whitman [wrote]( “than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.” Nearly a century later, James {NAME} (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) — another poet laureate of the human spirit — embodied this ethos in one of his shortest, most searing, and timeliest essays. In 1963, the children’s book author Charlotte Pomerantz edited an anthology of prominent writers’ and artists’ critiques of the House Committee on Un-American Activities — the Orwellian investigative committee largely responsible for [the internment of Japanese-Americans]( and [the Hollywood blacklist](. Titled [A Quarter-Century of Un-Americana, 1938– 1963: A Tragico-Comical Memorabilia of HUAC]( it featured writing and art by such titans of creative culture as Marianne Moore, Robert Lowell, and Ben Shahn. {NAME}’s contribution was later included in [The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings]( ([public library]( which also gave us his abiding insight into [the redemptive power of language]( and [the artist’s role in society](. James {NAME} Reflecting on how such metastases of power imperil the moral climate of a society and corrupt the very foundation of democracy, {NAME} writes: We are living through the most crucial moment of our history, the moment which will result in a new life for us, or a new death… a new vision of America, a vision which will allow us to face, and begin to change, the facts of American life… This seems a grim view to take of our situation, but it is scarcely grimmer than the facts. Our honesty and our courage in facing these facts is all that can save us from disaster. And one of these facts is that there has always been a segment of American life, and a powerful segment, too, which equated virtue with mindlessness… It always reminds me of a vast and totally untrustworthy bomb shelter in which groups of frightened people endlessly convince one another of its impregnability, while the real world outside — by which, again, I mean the facts of our private and public lives — calmly and inexorably prepares their destruction. {NAME} notes that this is the reality he himself inhabits as a black man, but it is a reality from which the vast majority of Americans spend their lives taking flight. In a sentiment of excruciating timeliness today, he writes: People in flight never can grow up, which means they can never, really, become citizens — and we simply must not surrender this great country to those people. We must not allow their fear to control us, and, indeed, we must not allow it to control them. Rather, we should attempt to release them from their panic and their unadmitted sorrow. We ought to try, by the example of our own lives, to prove that life is love and wonder and that that nation is doomed which penalizes those of its citizens who recognize and rejoice in this fact. Art by Ben Shahn from [On Nonconformity]( A century after Kierkegaard insisted that [“truth always rests with the minority… while the strength of a majority is illusory,”]( {NAME} adds: We must dare to take another view of majority rule… taking it upon ourselves to become the majority by changing the moral climate. For it is upon this majority that the life of any nation really depends. Half a century before Toni Morrison counseled young graduates that [“true adulthood… is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of,”]( {NAME} examines this intensely hard won glory not on the individual level but on the collective, and considers what true adulthood really means for a society: The time has come for us to grow up. A man grows up when he looks back, realizes what has happened to him, accepts it all, and begins to change himself. He cannot grow up until he reaches this moment and passes it. We are now at the end of our extraordinarily prolonged adolescence. A very great poet, an American, Miss [Marianne Moore]( wrote, many years ago, the following description of our terrors: “The weak overcomes its menace. The strong overcomes itself.” Two generations after some of the world’s most prominent thought leaders co-signed the [Declaration of the Independence of the Mind]( with the commitment “never to serve anything but the free Truth that has no frontiers and no limits and is without prejudice against races or castes,” {NAME} concludes: That self-knowledge which matures a nation as well as a man presupposes free men and free minds. Complement [The Cross of Redemption]( — a trove of cultural and spiritual insight that has only fermented with time — with {NAME} on [our capacity for transformation as individuals and nations]( [what it means to be an artist]( [freedom and how we imprison ourselves]( [the writer’s responsibility in a divided society]( and his fantastic forgotten conversations with Chinua Achebe about [the political power of art]( with Margaret Mead about [identity, race, and the experience of otherness]( and with Nikki Giovanni about [what it means to be truly empowered]( then revisit Albert Camus on [the artist as a voice of resistance]( and Iris Murdoch on [why art is essential for democracy](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( NAME}-a-quarter-century-of-un-americana/ on Facebook](NAME}-tiny-perfect-things?fblike=fblike-7f494bce&e=729b5d7c3e&socialproxy=https%3A%2F%2Fus2.campaign-archive.com%2Fsocial-proxy%2Ffacebook-like%3Fu%3D13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1%26id%3Dfbaed38c5c%26url%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F08%252F02%252Fjames-{NAME}-a-quarter-century-of-un-americana%252F%26title%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.brainpickings.org%252F2018%252F08%252F02...) donating=loving Each week of the past eleven years, I have poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and stimulation here this year, please consider supporting my labor of love with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now](