The New Romantics

I contend that the creator is an individual who manages a most formidable challenge: to wed the most advanced understandings achieved in a domain with the kinds of problems, questions, issues, and sensibilities that most characterized his or her life as a wonder-filled child.

"The Chinese say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye and the heart,” says the painter David Hockney. “I think that remark is very, very good. Two won’t do. A good eye and heart is not enough, neither is a good hand and eye.”

We have become used to the ease and convenience of our digital lives, and we expect the same offline. A slick, transactional, no-strings-attached kind of life, predictable and controllable.

. As author Leah Price put it in her book How to Do Things with Nooks in Victorian Britain: “Once a sign of economic power, reading is now the province of those whose time lacks market value.”

To be a gardener is to give a fuck. To be a gardener is to be invested in a place—to know it, to protect it, to be present to it. How can we protect and heal ourselves and our planet if we’re not willing to step into, and value, the role of the gardener?

We live in an age of lexical abundance. More words, more access, more content than at any time in human history. And yet something essential is slipping away. Not reading itself, but the kind of reading that once shaped minds and formed character: slow, immersive, reflective, and richly human. As Harold Bloom noted: “"We read deeply for varied... See more

In a world that glorifies individual success, we easily forget that our greatest power lies in our ability to come together.

This is the bottom line : if we don’t make room for deliberate play, we’ll burn out under the weight of seriousness we’ve forced upon our own shoulders.