Writers Poets Prophets
Like our own imagination, art can wander off, seeking out the edges, the borderlands, the mysteries. Indeed, this autonomy is art’s power and part of its emotional appeal. But this very ability to separate from everyday material life may also make art impotent in trying to shape the world from which it has escaped. At most it can be a nudge or a
... See moreGeoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society — the politicians, legislators, educators, and scientists — by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all
... See moreMaria Popova • James Baldwin on the Creative Process and the Artist’s Responsibility to Society
Lucy Sante - THIS LONG CENTURY
thislongcentury.comLucy Santos top 100 songs of the 20th century
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
— Annie Dillard, ’The Writing Life’, 1989
“The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your
... See more“The few moments of real presence you have ever felt in your life might mean that a god was inside someone near you, using them to see you. The few moments of real insight we’ve ever had about another might indicate that a god was inside us at that moment, using us to see them. When they brighten the characteristics of another person, it is like... See more
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