“From a letter written by a German soldier standing guard in the Russian winter in late December 1942:
‘The most beautiful Christmas I had ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings. I was all alone beneath an enormous starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience.’
Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent, the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, even the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.”
terry gross talks to maurice sendak about growing older (illustrated by christoph niemann)
art, darwin and evolutionary psychology in the new republic
“Art, then, can be defined as the calisthenics of pattern-finding…(Boyd) is proposing a direct link between art and fitness: the more art we experience, the more likely we are to survive and to reproduce. Art, in this model, is like a gym in which ‘we incrementally fine-tune our neural wiring through our repeated and focused engagement in each of the arts.’”
Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water, 2002
