Audubon on other minds and the secret knowledge of animals, the paradox of joy with Nick Cave and Lisel Mueller, how Dostoyevsky became a writer

Dostoyevsky identifies one of life’s great paradoxes: Happiness requires purpose; purpose requires a sense of direction; a sense of direction requires goal-setting—but happiness cannot be had by realizing those goals

Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave th... See more