Beethoven on creative vitality and resilience in the face of suffering, Maira Kalman and Daniel Handler's lyrical love letter to the elements and more

Beethoven on creative vitality and resilience in the face of suffering, Maira Kalman and Daniel Handler's lyrical illustrated love letter to the weather, Caitlin Moran on fighting the cowardice of cynicism, 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](. 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[Caitlin Moran on Fighting the Cowardice of Cynicism]( “There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing,” Maya Angelou wrote in contemplating [courage in the face of evil](. In the decades since, cynicism has become a cultural currency as deadly as blood diamonds, as vacant of integrity and long-term payoff as Enron. Over the years, I have [written about]( [spoken about]( and even [given a commencement address about]( the perilous laziness of cynicism and the ever-swelling urgency of not only resisting it but actively fighting it — defiance which Leonard Bernstein considered an essential [countercultural act of courage](. Today, as our social and political realities swirl into barely bearable maelstroms of complexity, making a retreat into self-protective cynicism increasingly tempting, such courage is all the harder and all the more heroic. That’s what English writer Caitlin Moran examines in a stirring passage from [How to Build a Girl]( ([public library]( — a novel that quenches questions springing from the same source as her insightful memoir-of-sorts [How To Be a Woman](. Illustration by Maurice Sendak from [Open House for Butterflies]( by Ruth Krauss Moran writes: When cynicism becomes the default language, playfulness and invention become impossible. Cynicism scours through a culture like bleach, wiping out millions of small, seedling ideas. Cynicism means your automatic answer becomes “No.” Cynicism means you presume everything will end in disappointment. And this is, ultimately, why anyone becomes cynical. Because they are scared of disappointment. Because they are scared someone will take advantage of them. Because they are fearful their innocence will be used against them — that when they run around gleefully trying to cram the whole world in their mouth, someone will try to poison them. In a sentiment that calls to mind Descartes’s abiding ideas about [the relationship between fear and hope]( Moran writes: Cynicism is, ultimately, fear. Cynicism makes contact with your skin, and a thick black carapace begins to grow — like insect armor. This armor will protect your heart, from disappointment — but it leaves you almost unable to walk. You cannot dance in this armor. Cynicism keeps you pinned to the spot, in the same posture, forever. A century and a half after Van Gogh [reflected on fear and risk-taking]( arguing that “however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth … steps in and does something,” Moran echoes Angelou and adds: The deepest irony about the young being cynical is that they are the ones that need to move, and dance, and trust the most. They need to cartwheel though a freshly burst galaxy of still-forming but glowing ideas, never scared to say “Yes! Why not!” — or their generation’s culture will be nothing but the blandest, and most aggressive, or most defended of old tropes. When young people are cynical, and snarky, they shoot down their own future. When you keep saying “No,” all that’s left is what other people said “Yes” to before you were born. Really, “No” is no choice at all. Complement with Rebecca Solnit on [resisting the defeatism of easy despair]( Jonathan Lear on [radical hope]( and Toni Morrison on [rising above fear in troubled times](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Weather, Weather: Maira Kalman and Daniel Handler’s Lyrical Illustrated Celebration of the Elements]( Certain languages, including French and my native Bulgarian, have one word for both “time” and “weather.” Perhaps the conflation arises from an inescapable similarity — like time, which [envelops the entirety of our conscious experience]( the weather is the indelible backdrop against which our lives are lived, constantly [coloring our state of mind]( and saturating our language with myriad metaphors. The abiding mystery and magic of our elemental companion is what artist Maira Kalman and writer Daniel Handler celebrate in [Weather, Weather]( — the third installment in their series of dreamlike picture-books for grownups in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, following [Hurry Up and Wait]( which explored the delicate art of presence in the age of productivity, and [Girls Standing on Lawns]( a work of unconcretizable aboutness and absolute delight. Once again, Kalman and Handler curate a selection of artworks from the museum’s collection around a theme — in this case, the weather. These photographs of physical environments from around the world pour forth their cascading meanings, relished differently with each contemplation. Handler’s poetic prose and Kalman’s original watercolors string the archival images together into a lyrical meditation on the role of the elements in the human experience. Art and life intersect with largehearted levity in the result of this imaginative and unusual collaboration. Illustration by Maira Kalman, based on Hatsuo Ikeuchi’s Snowflakes, c. 1950 László Moholy-Nagy: The Diving Board, 1931 Illustration by Maira Kalman, based on Man Diving, Esztergom by André Kertész, 1917 I was in my room wondering what it was like somewhere else. What’s the weather like? It’s like summer. It’s like doing nothing. Delicious. Illustration by Maira Kalman, based on Alfred Stieglitz’s Apples and Gable, Lake George, 1922 International News Photo: “The Portent of Coming Disaster: A Tornado, Photographed as It Moved across the Sky toward White, S.D., by a Cameraman Who Was the Only Person Who Did Not Take Shelter in a Cyclone Cellar. None of the Buildings Shown in the Picture Was Damaged, as They Were Not in the Direct Path of the Tornado,” 1938 The newspaper said it would be nice today. What does the newspaper know. Carl T. Gosset Jr./ The New York Times: “This Photo Was Made Just before 4 P.M. at Broadway and 43rd Street, Looking East across Times Square.” July 24, 1959 Illustration by Maira Kalman, based on Barney Ingoglia’s photograph for the New York Times article “Rain Raises Fears of Flooding: Pedestrians in Times Square Wading through a Puddle as Heavy Rains Began Yesterday. The Rain Was Expected to Continue Today, Melting Much of the Snow and Causing Fears of Flooding,” January 25, 1978 Clarence H. White: Drops of Rain, 1903 Illustration by Maira Kalman, based on Children Playing in Snow by John Vachon, 1940 Illustration by Maira Kalman, based on Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Alberto Giacometti Going Out for Breakfast, Paris, 1963 I can’t even say what it’s like. It’s perfect, the whole thing. Come with me, take me with you. Let’s go out together and have poached eggs. Delicious. Valery Shchekoldin: Uliyanovsk, 1978 Complement the tiny fabric-bound treasure [Weather, Weather]( with Kalman’s [Beloved Dog]( an illustrated homage to a constant companion of a very different sort, then revisit artist Lauren Redniss’s [exquisite celebration of the weather](. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [Take Fate by the Throat: Beethoven on Creative Vitality and Resilience in the Face of Suffering]( “After all that has been said and mused upon the ‘natural ills,’ the anxiety, and wearing out experienced by the true artist,” Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who paved the way for women in the arts, wrote in [reflecting on art and suffering]( from her sickbed, “is not the good immeasurably greater than the evil?” The great nineteenth-century poet is among the handful of highly influential artists who, [like Frida Kahlo]( surmounted an inordinate share of physical suffering to make art of unassailable beauty that heals the human spirit. Among those few was Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827), whose abidingly transcendent music sprang from the common fountain of his joy and his suffering. By his late twenties, Beethoven had begun losing his hearing — a deterioration that would result in near-total deafness by the end of his life, the source of which remains a medical mystery and the object of ample speculative mythologizing. One [contemporary biographer]( has proposed lead poisoning, while the composer himself allegedly implicated a fit of fury — a second-hand account reported to his [first serious biographer]( held that when a tenor interrupted Beethoven’s creative flow during a period of vigorous composition, he flew into a rage so violent that he collapsed to the floor in a seizure, hitting his head, and was deaf by the time he rose. Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler By the end of his thirtieth year, Beethoven began actively seeking medical help for the ailment that anguished him and abraded his pride in his exceptional musical ear. Just as he was wading through the enigma of his suffering, in that strange and inopportune way the heart has of sneaking up on its owner, he fell in love with a young countess. A year before he wrote the [spectacular letter to his brothers]( about the joy of suffering overcome, thirty-one-year-old Beethoven penned another letter of unrelenting optimism and towering spiritual resilience, found in the classic 1937 biography [Beethoven: His Spiritual Development]( ([public library](. Riding the tidal wave of elation that carries new love, Beethoven writes to his boyhood friend Franz Wegeler, then a medical student: Oh, if I were rid of this affliction I could embrace the world! I feel that my youth is just beginning and have I not always been ill? My physical strength has for a short time past been steadily growing more than ever and also my mental powers. Day by day I am approaching the goal which I apprehend but cannot describe. It is only in this that your Beethoven can live. Tell me nothing of rest. I know none but sleep, and woe is me that I must give up more than to it than usual. Grant me but half freedom from my affliction and then — as a complete, ripe man I shall return to you and renew the old feelings of friendship. You must see me as happy as it is possible to be here below — not unhappy. No! I cannot endure it. I will take fate by the throat; it shall not wholly overcome me. Oh, it is so beautiful to live — to live a thousand times! I feel that I am not made for a quiet life. He would go on to cultivate [a lifestyle regimen that sustains this superhuman vitality]( to embody [the crucial difference between genius and talent]( and to believe that [music saved his life](. Complement this portion of [Beethoven: His Spiritual Development]( with the great composer’s [love letters to his “immortal beloved”]( and his [touching letter of advice on being an artist]( written to a little girl who sent him fan mail. [Forward to a friend]( / [Read Online]( / [Like on Facebook]( [The Search for a New Humility: Václav Havel on Reclaiming Our Human Interconnectedness in a Globalized Yet Divided World]( In his clever 1958 allegory [I, Pencil]( the libertarian writer Leonard Read used the complex chain of resources and competences involved in the production of a single pencil to illustrate the vital web of interdependencies — economic as well as ethical — undergirding humanity’s needs and knowledge. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” Dr. King [wrote from Birmingham City Jail]( five years later, as the material aspects of our interconnectedness became painfully inseparable from the moral. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” How to inhabit our individual role in that mutuality with responsible integrity is what the great Czech dissident Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011) addressed in his 1995 Harvard commencement address, later published under the title “Radical Renewal of Human Responsibility” in his collected speeches and writings, [The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice]( ([public library](. Václav Havel Havel — a man of immense erudition and literary genius, who embodied Walt Whitman’s insistence that [literature is essential for democracy]( who went from playwright to president, who endured multiple imprisonments to uphold his ideals of justice, humanism, anti-consumerism, and environmental responsibility — begins by recounting an incident that sobered him to the irreversible forces of globalization: Sitting at a waterfront restaurant one evening, watching young people drink the same drinks as those served in his homeland to the sound of the same music that fills Prague’s cafés, surrounded by the same advertisements, he is reminded of the fact that he is in Singapore only by the different facial features of his fellow diners. A decade before the social web subverted geography to common interests, values, and sensibilities as the centripetal force of community formation, Havel writes: The world is now enmeshed in webs of telecommunication networks consisting of millions of tiny threads, or capillaries, that not only transmit information of all kinds at lightning speed, but also convey integrated models of social, political and economic behavior. They are conduits for legal norms, as well as for billions and billions of dollars crisscrossing the world while remaining invisible even to those who deal directly with them…. The capillaries that have so radically integrated this civilization also convey information about certain modes of human co­-existence that have proven their worth, like democracy, respect for human rights, the rule of law, the laws of the market­place. Such information flows around the world and, in varying degrees, takes root in different places. And yet, with prescience painfully evident two decades later, Havel cautions that there is a dark side to this undamming of information and ideas: Many of the great problems we face today, as far as I understand them, have their origin in the fact that this global civilization, though in evidence everywhere, is no more than a thin veneer over the sum total of human awareness… This civilization is immensely fresh, young, new, and fragile, and the human spirit has accepted it with dizzying alacrity, without itself changing in any essential way. Humanity has gradually, and in very diverse ways, shaped our habits of mind, our relationship to the world, our models of behavior and the values we accept and recognize. In essence, this new, single epidermis of world civilization merely covers or conceals the immense variety of cultures, of peoples, of religious worlds, of historical traditions and historically formed attitudes, all of which in a sense lie “beneath” it. At the same time, even as the veneer of world civilization expands, this “underside” of humanity, this hidden dimension of it, demands more and more clearly to be heard and to be granted a right to life. And thus, while the world as a whole increasingly accepts the new habits of global civilization, another contradictory process is taking place: ancient traditions are reviving, different religions and cultures are awakening to new ways of being, seeking new room to exist, and struggling with growing fervor to realize what is unique to them and what makes them different from others. Ultimately they seek to give their individuality a political expression. With an eye to the dangerously disproportionate dominance of Euro-American values in this global marketplace of values and ideas, Havel writes: It is a challenge to this civilization to start understanding itself as a multi­cultural and a multi­polar civilization, whose meaning lies not in undermining the individuality of different spheres of culture and civilization but in allowing them to be more completely themselves. This will only be possible, even conceivable, if we all accept a basic code of mutual co­existence, a kind of common minimum we can all share, one that will enable us to go on living side by side. Yet such a code won’t stand a chance if it is merely the product of a few who then proceed to force it on the rest. It must be an expression of the authentic will of everyone, growing out of the genuine spiritual roots hidden beneath the skin of our common, global civilization. If it is merely disseminated through the capillaries of the skin, the way Coca-Cola ads are ­– as a commodity offered by some to others ­– such a code can hardly be expected to take hold in any profound or universal way. Illustration from Alice and Martin Provensen’s [vintage adaptation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey]( Acknowledging that such a line of thought might be dismissed by cynics as unrealistically utopian, Havel insists on not losing hope — lucid hope. “This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen,” Rebecca Solnit would write a generation later in her [electrifying manifesto for civilizational resilience](. “It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both.” A decade before philosopher Jonathan Lear made his case for [“radical hope,”]( Havel writes: I have not lost hope because I am persuaded again and again that, lying dormant in the deepest roots of most, if not all, cultures there is an essential similarity, something that could be made ­ if the will to do so existed –­ a genuinely unifying starting point for that new code of human co­ existence that would be firmly anchored in the great diversity of human traditions. He points out that at the heart of every spiritual tradition, no matter its geographic or temporal origin, is a set of common moral principles upholding values like kindness, benevolence, and respect for human dignity. And yet, in an era of such irreversible triumphs of science as the splitting of the atom and the discovery of DNA — triumphs which Einstein believed united humanity through [“the common language of science”]( — any real movement toward healing the ruptures of our natural interconnectedness lies not in reverting to ancient religions but in integrating the achievements of reason with the core values of the human spirit. Half a century after pioneering biologist and writer Rachel Carson [invited us to step out of the human perspective]( Havel writes: Only a dreamer can believe that the solution lies in curtailing the progress of civilization in some way or other. The main task in the coming era is something else: a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility. Our conscience must catch up to our reason, otherwise we are lost. It is my profound belief that there is only one way to achieve this: we must divest ourselves of our egotistical anthropocentrism, our habit of seeing ourselves as masters of the universe who can do whatever occurs to us. We must discover a new respect for what transcends us: for the universe, for the earth, for nature, for life, and for reality. Our respect for other people, for other nations and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it, that we share in it and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of being, where it is judged. Illustration by Soyeon Kim from [Wild Ideas]( Havel calls for “the search for a new humility” — a search that politicians have an especial responsibility to enact: Even in the most democratic of conditions, politicians have immense influence, perhaps more than they themselves realize. This influence does not lie in their actual mandates, which in any case are considerably limited. It lies in something else: in the spontaneous impact their charisma has on the public. In a passage of bittersweet poignancy against the contrast of our present political reality, Havel adds: The main task of the present generation of politicians is not, I think, to ingratiate themselves with the public through the decisions they take or their smiles on television. It is not to go on winning elections and ensuring themselves a place in the sun till the end of their days. Their role is something quite different: to assume their share of responsibility for the long-­range prospects of our world and thus to set an example for the public in whose sight they work. Their responsibility is to think ahead boldly, not to fear the disfavor of the crowd, to imbue their actions with a spiritual dimension (which of course is not the same thing as ostentatious attendance at religious services), to explain again and again ­ both to the public and to their colleagues ­– that politics must do far more than reflect the interests of particular groups or lobbies. After all, politics is a matter of servicing the community, which means that it is morality in practice, and how better to serve the community and practice morality than by seeking in the midst of the global (and globally threatened) civilization their own global political responsibility: that is, their responsibility for the very survival of the human race? Standing before “perhaps the most famous university in the most powerful country in the world,” Havel issues a particularly urgent exhortation to American politicians: There is simply no escaping the responsibility you have as the most powerful country in the world. There is far more at stake here than simply standing up to those who would like once again to divide the world into spheres of interest, or subjugate others who are different from them, and weaker. What is now at stake is saving the human race. In other words, it’s a question of what I’ve already talked about: of understanding modern civilization as a multi­cultural and multi­polar civilization, of turning our attention to the original spiritual sources of human culture and above all, of our own culture, of drawing from these sources the strength for a courageous and magnanimous creation of a new order for the world. With a cautionary eye to “the banal pride of the powerful” — corruption of character which Hannah Arendt followed to its gruesome extreme in her timeless treatise on [the banality of evil]( — Havel adds: Pride is precisely what will lead the world to hell. I am suggesting an alternative: humbly accepting our responsibility for the world. Looking back at his own life with the astonishment of one who grew up under the locked-in nationalism of a communist authoritarian regime, then went on to travel to places like Singapore and address the graduating class at Harvard, Havel ends on a note of radical, responsible hope: I have been given to understand how small this world is and how it torments itself with countless things it need not torment itself with if people could find within themselves a little more courage, a little more hope, a little more responsibility, a little more mutual understanding and love. Complement this fragment of Havel’s wholly ennobling [Art of the Impossible]( with other [exceptional commencement addresses]( — including 21-year-old Hillary Rodham on [making the impossible possible]( and Joseph Brodsky on [our mightiest antidote to evil]( — then revisit Eleanor Roosevelt on [the power of personal responsibility in social change](. [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 :: Made inBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences](