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Why our house is a library
I’ve often joked that if I were to write a parenting book I’d call it Parent Like A Librarian.
At the library, there are strict rules for behavior that create an environment in which anyone can learn, but there is no agenda, no plan — only time, space, and resources.
The librarian is there to serve whoever comes through the door by connecting them with what they need.
The librarian creates and maintains a collection of materials, makes spaces in which people can work and study, and curates programming tailored to the interests of the humans they serve.
The librarian does not demand any results, does not ask us to be anything other than what we are.
The library is a truly lifelong learning environment — our relationship with the library never ends. As we grow and change, the librarian connects us with what we need.
Read more: “Why our house is a library”
Exhausting routines
As a followup to my letter, “Your hobby looks exhausting!” I wrote another letter, “Your routine sounds exhausting!” about why we care what creative people do with their days:
Maybe your own personal routine should look exhausting to someone else! What sets you free — the more it’s really yours — should probably look like torture to someone else.
Read the rest here.
Fear and… something
In the first episode of Civilisation (1969), “The Skin of our Teeth,” Kenneth Clark takes on why the Roman Empire fell:
“However complex and solid it seems, civilisation is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear — fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague… fears that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then boredom. The feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity…”
In the book, Clark switches the word “boredom” to “exhaustion,” which is interesting to me. He continues:
“[Civilisation] requires confidence — confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers… People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid.
Jeez, alright K.C., so where does that leave the individual?
Here’s what Jungian James Hollis has to say in his book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:
Each morning the twin gremlins of fear and lethargy sit at the foot of our bed and smirk. Fear of further departure, fear of the unknown, fear of the challenge of largeness intimidates us back into our convenient rituals, conventional thinking, and familiar surroundings. To be recurrently intimidated by the task of life is a form of spiritual annihilation. On the other front, lethargy seduces us with sibilant whispers: kick back, chill out, numb out, take it easy for a while . . . sometimes for a long while, sometimes a lifetime, sometimes a spiritual oblivion.
Hollis says that this daily confrontation “obliges us to choose between anxiety and depression.”
Faced with such a choice, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative. The former keeps us on the edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.
To quote Kenneth Clark in the last episode of Civilisation, “One may be optimistic, but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.”
(I’m not quite sure yet if/how Hunter S. Thompson’s “fear and loathing” fits in, or Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” which comes from Philippians 2:12: “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”)
The counterpoint of pictures and words
Here is a page from my pocket notebook of Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen discussing a new picture-book version of “Hansel and Gretel,” which was made by Stephen King adding words to Maurice Sendak’s designs for an opera.
JON: I’d say the illustrator is in the business of reacting to the text, doing work the manuscript doesn’t do. This can mean providing new information, adding a different tone or even subverting the words a little.
MAC: It’s this fluid, playful dynamic between text and image that animates the art form. As Sendak himself put it, the picture book is “an ingenious juxtaposition of picture and word, a counterpoint. … Words are left out — but the picture says it. Pictures are left out — but the word says it.”
That Sendak quote is from his praise for Randolph Caldecott:
Caldecott’s work heralds the beginning of the modern picture book. He devised an ingenious juxtaposition of picture and word, a counterpoint that had never happened before. Words are left out – but the picture says it. Pictures are left out – but the word says it. In short, it is the invention of the picture book.
I fixated on Sendak’s use of the word “counterpoint,” because I sort of remembered him being a classical music geek. (I remembered correctly.)
In another interview, Sendak explained his counterpoint idea in a little more detail:
I think what happens is if you’ve got enough confidence in yourself and you’ve resolved the text, that the pictures then do a second story, not be a mere echo. “Jane walked into the room and was eaten by the plant.” You don’t need to draw that, although maybe you’d like to draw that. But, in fact, you should draw something else. There should be a counterpoint between your pictures and your text. The best-illustrated books are the books where the text does one thing and the pictures say something just a little off-center of the language, so they’re both doing something. Otherwise you have an echo chamber. The most boring books are where the pictures are restating the text.
Who needs that? The text said it much better. So you cannot separate the pictures from the text, you shouldn’t be able to, not in a well-constructed book. They should fit in like machinery.
Because music is really my first love, I am always looking for musical metaphors to help me conceptualize my writing better.
A footnote: This morning I heard R.E.M.’s “It’s The End of the World As We Know It,” and I was thinking about how much I like Mike Mills’ backing vocal response to the main chorus line. (“It’s time I had some time alone.”) It reminded me of The Beatles’ “Getting Better,” how Paul McCartney’s “Got to admit it’s getting better / a little better / all the time” was answered by John Lennon’s sardonic backing vocal, “It couldn’t get no worse!” It’s not technically musical counterpoint, I don’t think, but it’s interplay between voices that deepens the work.
Looking back a few seasons
I came across this photo of me from a Laity Lodge retreat back in February and it made me laugh. I look exactly how I feel when I’m trying to figure something out.
These photos are from a block-printing workshop led by designer Dana Tanamachi. (I wrote a little bit more about it here.) Looking back on a few seasons ago, it’s fun to think about how that block-printing seed was planted and led to a whole flurry of activity afterwards…
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