Rishita Chaudhary

I looked into the open mouth of the volcano taunting the sky in the language of time.

Suppose that you sign up for a classical-music-appreciation class, in which your first assignment is to listen to a symphony. You put on headphones, press Play-and fall asleep. The problem is that you don't actually want to listen to classical music; you just want to want to. Aspiring, Callard thinks, is a common human activity: there are aspiring... See more

Human existence is characterized by a perpetual dissatisfaction, a divine discontent, with who we are now, and what our world looks like now, compared to what it could be. Change is unpredictable; we rarely know how things will turn out in the end. But we still invite it, still seek it out.

Artmaking is, for many, an essential part of enacting these... See more

“a protection against real intimacy, real friendship and real engagement with our work,” a way not to feel “the full vulnerability of being visible and touchable in a difficult world.” In anxiety, we disallow ourselves “the ability to stop and rest and the spacious silence needed for... a new understanding” — and all true intimacy opens into a new... See more

But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of... See more

And indeed the sense that we are are unfinished — as individuals and as a species, in our personal development and our interpersonal relations and our evolutionary trajectory — may be the single most hopeful thing about being alive, the truest grounds for faith.

“My soul is a hidden orchestra,” the first entry reads. “I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony.”