Today’s newsletter includes a free downloadable zine called “More Light!”
It begins:
It gets dark so early these days I find myself sundowning around 3PM. I got so many wonderful notes about the gratitude zines, I decided to revive my creative seasons project and make an interactive winter solstice zine about light.
You can read the rest and download the zine here.
My friend Alan Jacobs writes in response to a piece bemoaning the fact that nobody reads Arthur Koestler anymore:
You can curse the darkness, or you can light a candle. You can lament that people don’t know the value of Arthur Koestler’s work, or you can write an essay that seeks to call readers’ attention to his best writing. If young people today do not know of events or artists or thinkers or works that you think they would benefit from knowing, you can tell them. That’s one of the main things writers are for.
I am big on being a “curious elder” — and one way, I think, to expand the curious elder idea is to not just be curious about what young people are into, but to also share your curiosity about the world in a way that is generous but without expectation. To point out the things you think are good… just in case somebody, maybe even somebody younger, is looking for them.
(I should note I found the Peanuts comic by looking up the origins of the phrase.)
Related: “Be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
Friday’s newsletter was inspired by our recent trip to New Mexico.
It ended on this note about travel:
I am a big believer that travel doesn’t relieve your problems, it throws them into relief. You see your life in a new light and new shadows. The desert light can be good for this. At its peak, it is harsh and unforgiving, but at dusk and dawn it softens, becomes more mysterious. Every trip has its challenges, but I returned home, as I often do, with a sense of perspective and a clarity about what I want to do next. What more could one ask for? (“Go away so you can come back.”)
What I liked most about New Mexico was being in the forests and the deserts outside of town.
In Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac, a fictional Richard Feynman says:
Los Alamos was high up on a mesa with tall cliffs carved in dark red earth, lots of trees and shrubs all around. The landscape was breathtaking, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Coming from New York, I’d never traveled out to the West before, so I really felt like I was in another world. In Mars or something. It had the strange energy of a sacred space, a haven far away from the civilized world, away from prying eyes, farther than God could see. The perfect spot to do the unimaginable.
Read more in “The Land of Enchantment.”
Here is a photo of one of the lamps that frame the entrance to the Defiance Public Library, designed by the Wing & Mahurin architectural firm in 1904. Accompanying the hand holding a torch are the supposed last words of Goethe in German, “Mehr Licht,” or “More Light.” (As @JoshLipnik explains, “It’s common to see tributes to Goethe at American libraries, especially in states like Ohio which had many immigrants from Germany at the time.”)
“More light” is a near-perfect motto to put on the side of a public library, but it’s even more meaningful when you know something about Goethe, who is not only seen as a giant of the German en-light-enment, but also spent decades of his life literally investigating light, culminating in his work, Theory of Color.
Goethe’s big idea, as far as I understand it, was that light is pure and doesn’t contain color, but rather that our perception of color is the result of light colliding with various mediums of darkness, and that the spectrum of colors we see is the result of a “polarity” between light and dark. So, unlike Newton, Goethe didn’t think of darkness as the absence of light, but polar to it, something for light to interact with. (More on the difference between Newton and Goethe.)
According to Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, Goethe sought refuge in his color studies in times of personal and political struggle. (Apparently he had a “large paper sack” made to fit all of his manuscripts, color charts, and sketches.) Many people were angry at Goethe that he was wasting his time on color when he should be speaking up about more pressing cultural matters. When Goethe finally published his book, scientists mostly mocked it or ignored it.
But his color studies colored his understanding of life. He wrote in his diary on May 26, 1807:
Love and hate, hope and fear are also only different conditions of our murky inner life through which our spirit looks either toward the light or toward the shadows. If we look through those murky organic surroundings toward the light, then we love and hope; if we look toward the darkness, then we hate and fear.
As for his last words, “more light,” while they are poetic and symbolic, what he actually said to his doctor on his deathbed was probably a little more down-to-earth: “Do open the shutter of the bedroom so that more light may enter.”
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Filed under: light
When I wrote about Claude Debussy’s burn on overworked musical pieces, “They smell of the lamp, not of the sun,” I didn’t realize that he was quoting a very old idiom. From a 1898 Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
Smells of the lamp
Said of a literary production manifestly laboured. Plutarch attributes the phrase to Pytheas the orator, who said, “The orations of Demosthenes smell of the lamp,” alluding to the current tale that the great orator lived in an underground cave lighted by a lamp, that he might have no distraction to his severe study.
In Lives, Plutarch writes about how Demosthenes wasn’t necessarily quick on his feet with speeches — if he was asked a question in public, he wouldn’t stand up and talk about something he hadn’t thought about, but took time to go away to his study and work out arguments.
For this, many of the popular leaders used to rail at him, and Pytheas, in particular, once told him scoffingly that his arguments smelt of lamp-wicks. To him, then, Demosthenes made a sharp answer. “Indeed,” said he, “thy lamp and mine, O Pytheas, are not privy to the same pursuits.”
In another translation:
…many of the popular pleaders used to make it a jest against him; and Pytheas once, scoffing at him, said that his arguments smelt of the lamp. To which Demosthenes gave the sharp answer, “It is true, indeed, Pytheas, that your lamp and mine are not conscious of the same things.”
And another story about his lamp:
And to the thief nicknamed Brazen, who attempted to make fun of him for his late hours and his writing at night, “I know,” he said, “that I annoy you with my lighted lamp. But you, men of Athens, must not wonder at the thefts that are committed, when we have thieves of brass, but house-walls of clay.”
Now I am conflicted, as a burn that is about overworked creative efforts was originally pointed at a dude who was probably just introverted and studious and thoughtful and against bullshittery!
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