The topography of tears, the trouble with "finding yourself," Beethoven and the crucial difference between genius and talent, and more

The topography of tears, the trouble with "finding yourself," Beethoven and the crucial difference between genius and talent, Gwendolyn Brooks's lovely vintage ode to why we read, and more. NOTE: This message might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](. If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( – it's free. donating = loving I pour tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider supporting my labor of love with a recurring monthly [donation]( of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner: [Subscribe]( You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount: [Donate]( And if you've already donated, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. If you wish to cancel your recurring donation, you can do so [here](. Share [[Forward] Forward to a friend]( Connect [[Facebook] Facebook]( [[Twitter] Twitter]( [[Instagram] Instagram]( [[Tumblr] Tumblr]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [Unsubscribe]( [Welcome]Hello, {NAME}! This is the weekly email digest of [brainpickings.org]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition – Alain de Botton on infatuation, Ursula K. Le Guin on storytelling, "The Universe in Verse" in full, the central mystery of consciousness, 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. [The Topography of Tears: A Stunning Aerial Tour of the Landscape of Human Emotion Through an Optical Microscope]( are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her incisive treatise on [the intelligence of emotions]( titled after Proust’s powerful poetic image depicting the emotions as “geologic upheavals of thought.” But much of the messiness of our emotions comes from the inverse: Our thoughts, in a sense, are geologic upheavals of feeling — an immensity of our reasoning is devoted to making sense of, or rationalizing, the emotional patters that underpin our intuitive responses to the world and therefore shape our very reality. Our interior lives unfold across landscapes that seem to belong to an alien world whose terrain is as difficult to map as it is to navigate — a world against which the young Dostoyevsky roiled in a [frustrated letter on reason and emotion]( and one which Antoine de Saint-Exupéry embraced so lyrically in one of the most memorable lines from The Little Prince: “It is such a secret place, the land of tears.” The geologic complexity of that secret place is what photographer [Rose-Lynn Fisher]( explores in [The Topography of Tears]( ([public library]( — a striking series of duotone photographs of tears shed for a kaleidoscope of reasons, dried on glass slides and captured in a hundredfold magnification through a high-resolution optical microscope. What emerges is an enthralling aerial tour of the landscape of human emotion and its the most stirring eruptions — joy, grief, gladness, remorse, hope — reminding us that the terra incognita of our interiority is better trekked with an explorer’s benevolent curiosity about the varied beauty of the landscape than with a conquistador’s forceful intent to control and sublimate. (Artist Maira Kalman affirmed this notion with great simplicity and poignancy in a page from her marvelous [philosophical children’s book]( “If you need to cry you should cry.”) Tears of grief Tears of change Tears of possibility / hope Building on her previous [mesmerizing photomicrographs of bees]( Fisher uses the technological tools of science to probe the poetic, immaterial dimensions of a universal human behavior radiating infinite emotional hues. Most of the tears she photographed are her own, but she also looked at those of men, women, and children from different backgrounds, crying for a variety of reasons. Accompanying each photograph is a caption ranging from the descriptive to the lyrically abstract — tears of compassion, tears of grief, tears of remorse, “tears for those who yearn for liberation,” “tears of elation at a liminal moment.” Tears of compassion Tears of redemption In the introduction, Fisher reflects on the symbolic undertones of this inquiry into “the intangible poetry of life,” a project nearly a decade in the making: Though the empirical nature of tears is a composition of water, proteins, minerals, hormones, and enzymes, the topography of tears is a momentary landscape, transient as the fingerprint of someone in a dream. The accumulation of these images is like an ephemeral atlas. […] Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as rites of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Tears spontaneously release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis, intractable resistance short-circuited… It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean. Tears of remorse Onion tears Tears for what couldn’t be fixed Fittingly, the book features a short essay on tears by the poet Ann Lauterbach, who observed in another [beautiful meditation on why we make art]( that “the crucial job of artists is to find a way to release materials into the animated middle ground between subjects, and so to initiate the difficult but joyful process of human connection” — a perfect articulation of the heart of Fisher’s project. In her essay for the book, Lauterbach writes: “For a tear is an intellectual thing,” the great subversive 19th-century poet William Blake wrote, railing against the Deists, classical and contemporary; he believed they had stripped religion of its signal call for forgiveness, assigning too much authority to a single God and making human life untenable in its guilty abrasions. Tears are intellectual because they come from thoughts that spill over the body’s containing well; they are the secretion of excess we assign to emotion; perhaps emotion itself is simply caused by a surfeit of thought. One tries to unbind these durable dualities, to allow for the morphological shift that might allow the human creature to be complex but integrated, not divided into anatomical parts, all nouns and no transitive verb. We are not yet mechanical, technological things, we are intellectual — thinking — beings, and we cry when stirred beyond the capture of signifying Logos, which relents into flows of passionate silence. Perhaps this flow is the very proof that we cannot put our feelings in one place and our thoughts in another, the bleak result of a certain rationalism that threatens to overtake our civility — our capacity to forgive — and wants to make all ideas into abstractions, rigid and blunt, free of secretions. Overwhelmed tears Tears after goodbye Complement the contemplative splendor of [The Topography of Tears]( with [the science of why we cry]( Mark Rothko on [why people weep before his art]( and William James’s [revolutionary mind-body theory of emotion](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [The Trouble with “Finding Yourself”]( “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” 30-year-old Nietzsche wrote in his treatise on [how to find yourself](. And yet in the century and a half since, a curious dissonance has begun to reverberate across culture: On the one hand, we have grown increasingly fixated on the self as the focal lens for interpreting the world — a fixation which Ian McEwan [so brilliantly satirized]( and which has precipitated today’s tragic epidemic of militant identity politics; on the other hand, the rise of neuroscience has demonstrated again and again that the self we experience as so overwhelmingly real — the psychophysiological raft of experience through which we float along the river of life — [is a sensory-perceptual byproduct of consciousness]( completely illusory in its solidity. Nearly half a century ago, the Pulitzer-winning poet Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905–September 15, 1989) cast a cautionary eye to the notion of “finding oneself” in [Democracy and Poetry]( ([public library]( — his magnificent Jefferson Lecture about [power, tenderness, and art’s role in a healthy society](. Robert Penn Warren Decades before Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s witty and wise observation that [“human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,”]( Warren challenges the cultural trend of young people taking “time off” from school or work in order to “get away from it all” and find themselves. He writes: In the phrase [“to find myself”] lurks the idea that the self is a pre-existing entity, a self like a Platonic idea existing in a mystic realm beyond time and change. No, rather an object like a nugget of gold in the placer pan, the Eater egg under the bush at an Easter-egg hunt, a four-leaf clover to promise miraculous luck. Here is the essence of passivity, one’s quintessential luck. And the essence of absurdity, too, for the self is never to be found, but must be created, not the happy accident of passivity, but the product of a thousand actions, large and small, conscious or unconscious, performed not “away from it all,” but in the face of “it all,” for better or for worse, in work and leisure rather than in free time. In consonance with my own deep belief in [the ongoingness and fluidity of our becoming]( Warren adds: The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process of a healthy society itself. In a sentiment that calls to mind Academy of American Poets executive director Jennifer Benka’s beautiful observation that [“poems are physical sites of discovery [and] sense-records of our humanity,”]( Warren considers the role of poetry as a locus of our evolving being: How does poetry come into all this? By being an antidote, a sovereign antidote, for passivity. For the basic fact about poetry is that it demands participation, from the secret physical echo in muscle and nerve that identifies us with the medium, to the imaginative enactment that stirs the deepest recesses where life-will and values reside. Beyond that, it nourishes our life-will in the process of testing our values. And this is not to be taken as implying a utilitarian aesthetic. It is, rather, one way of describing our pleasure in poetry as an adventure in the celebration of life. Complement this particular portion of Warren’s thoroughly transcendent [Democracy and Poetry]( with Walt Whitman on [identity and the paradox of the self]( and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein on [what makes you and your childhood self the “same” person despite a lifetime of change]( then revisit Elizabeth Alexander on [what poetry does for the human spirit](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Beethoven and the Crucial Difference Between Genius and Talent]( The question of whether talent and genius differ in degree or in kind is an abiding one, and often discomfiting for any creative person to contemplate — we don’t, after all, like to consider that we might be merely endowed with talent but bereft of genius. And yet examining the relationship between the two can be a source of tremendously vitalizing insight into the creative spirit in its multitude of manifestations. Thoreau drew a vital distinction between [an artisan, an artist, and a genius](. Schopenhauer [likened talent to hitting a target no one else can hit and genius to hitting a target no one else can see](. “Genius gives birth, talent delivers,” Jack Kerouac asserted in contemplating [whether great artists are born or made](. “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins,” James {NAME} cautioned aspiring writers as he considered [the real building blocks of genius](. Another illuminating distinction between genius and talent comes from biographer Jan Swafford in [Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph]( ([public library]( — his fascinating account of an artist marked by [the tragic and triumphant genius of being an outsider]( whom Swafford describes as “utterly sure of himself and his gift, but no less self-critical and without sentimentality concerning his work.” Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler With an eye to Beethoven’s unmistakable genius, Swafford writes: Genius is something that lies on the other side of talent… Talent is largely inborn, and in a given field some people have it to a far higher degree than others. Still, in the end talent is not enough to push you to the highest achievements. Genius has to be founded on major talent, but it adds a freshness and wildness of imagination, a raging ambition, an unusual gift for learning and growing, a depth and breadth of thought and spirit, an ability to make use of not only your strengths but also your weaknesses, an ability to astonish not only your audience but yourself. Reflecting on [the cultural history of genius]( Swafford adds: My sense of the idea is closer to that of the eighteenth century: I believe in genius, but not in demigods… For me, the idea of spending one’s life chasing something impossible is simply normal, necessary, even a touch heroic. It is what artists do all the time. He quotes Beethoven himself, who wrote in a poetic passage from his 1812 [letter to Emilie]( The true artist has no pride. He sees unfortunately that art has no limits; he has a vague awareness of how far he is from reaching his goal; and while others may perhaps admire him, he laments the fact that he has not yet reached the point whither his better genius only lights the way for him like a distant sun. Complement this particular portion of the thoroughly fascinating [Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph]( with neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal on [the six “diseases of the will” that keep the talented from achieving greatness]( then revisit Beethoven’s stirring letter to his brothers about [how music saved his life]( and [the secret to his superhuman vitality](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Book Power: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Forgotten 1969 Ode to Why We Read]( “Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world,” [wrote]( the poet Mary Ruefle. “A book is a heart that beats in the chest of another,” Rebecca Solnit asserted in her lyrical meditation on [why we read and write](. But whatever our poetic images and metaphors for the varied ways in which books transform us — [“the axe for the frozen sea within us,”]( per Franz Kafka, or [“proof that humans are capable of working magic,”]( per Carl Sagan — the one indisputable constant is that they do transform us, in ways which we may not always be able to measure but can always feel in the core of our being. That’s what Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917–December 2, 2000) celebrates in a lovely short poem titled “Book Power.” Originally written for National Children’s Book Week in 1969 — nearly two decades after Brooks, at only twenty-three, became the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize — it was eventually included in the 1998 out-of-print gem [Book Poems: Poems from National Children’s Book Week, 1959–1998]( ([public library]( and was later printed on a bookmark distributed for National Children’s Book Week. Gwendolyn Brooks, 1957 (Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS) BOOK POWER by Gwendolyn Brooks BOOKS FEED AND CURE AND CHORTLE AND COLLIDE In all this willful world of thud and thump and thunder man’s relevance to books continues to declare. Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower, steel, stitch, and cloud and clout, and drumbeats in the air. Gwendolyn Brooks bookmark signed by the poet (courtesy of the [Academy of American Poets]( Complement with Neil Gaiman on [why we read]( Hermann Hesse on [why we always will]( James {NAME} on [how he read his way to a different destiny]( and Maurice Sendak’s [lovely posters celebrating reading]( then revisit Brooks’s [advice to writers]( and her visionary [vintage poems for kids]( celebrating diversity and the universal spirit of childhood. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [BP] If you enjoy my newsletter, please consider helping me keep it going with a modest [donation](. [Donate]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Our mailing address is: Brain Pickings :: NO UNSOLICITED MAILINGS, PLEASE. 47 Bergen Street, 3rd floorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences](