| |  Hello Reader! This is the weekly email digest of the daily online journal Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Octavia Butler on creative drive and how we become who we are, Teddy Roosevelt on the two pillars of citizenship, Dylan Thomas's cosmic ode to trees — you can catch up right here. And don't miss the anniversary edition of essential life-learnings from 14 years of Brain Pickings. If you find any value and joy in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation – I spend innumerable hours and tremendous resources on it each week, as I have been for fourteen years, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. | 
The history of the world is the history of telling others who and what we are — from tribal markings to national flags to family crests to pronoun-specifying email signatures. Every war that has ever been fought, political or personal, has been staked on these battlegrounds of identity and belonging. Every work of art that has ever been made has turned the battleground into a garden, where these same seeds of selfhood have come abloom in the artist's being to touch with the pollen of some grander beauty and some larger truth other beings, clarifying and fortifying their own identity, their own presence, their own belonging in history. "An artist," James Baldwin told the interviewer in his historic 1963 LIFE profile, "is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are." Who and what we are is, of course, a complex mosaic with myriad tesserae, drawn from our genetic and cultural inheritance, shaped by the biological ancestors chance has dealt us and shaped equally by the spiritual ancestors we have chosen for ourselves, all of our ancestors themselves shaped by myriad confluences of chance and choice. The mosaic rests atop the most elemental stratum of our nature, for as Rachel Carson observed, "our origins are of the earth… so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity." Musician and conceptual poet Meshell Ndegeocello reanimates Baldwin's words from that altogether vivifying 1963 interview to weave around them a lush lyric meditation on the roots and realities of personhood in an enchanting prose-poem, part of her multimedia experience Chapter and Verse — a project she envisioned as "a twenty-first-century ritual toolkit for justice, a call for revolution, a gift during turbulent times," inspired by Baldwin's prophetic 1963 book The Fire Next Time, which occasioned the LIFE tribute. 
 You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
Complement this small fragment of Ndegeocello's majestic Chapter and Verse with Anne Lamott's lovely letter to children about books as an antidote to isolation and Baldwin's great friend, champion, and fellow genius Gwendolyn Brooks's forgotten 1969 poem about the power of books, then revisit Baldwin's own account of how he read his way from Harlem to the literary pantheon and some of his most poignant, least known words of wisdom set to music by Ndegeocello's friends and frequent collaborators Morley and Chris Bruce. donating=lovingEvery week since 2006, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy and solace in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. (If you've had a change of heart or circumstance and wish to rescind your support, you can do so at this link.) monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |  | |  | | | Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 | | 
Ever since we climbed down from the trees, we have been looking up to them to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. "Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree," Hermann Hesse wrote a century ago in his sublime sylvan love letter, affirming that "when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy." Centuries, millennia before Hesse — before Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Prize for her courageously enacted conviction that "a tree is a little bit of the future," before scientists uncovered the astonishing language of trees, before Western artists saw in tree silhouettes a Rorschach test for what we are — the indigenous artists and storytellers of the Gond tribe in central India have been reverencing the secret lives of trees as portals into the inner life of nature, into the wildness of our own nature, into a supra-natural universe of myth and magic.  The Tell-Tale Tree A decade after the Indian artisan community and independent publisher Tara Books created the astonishing handmade masterpiece The Night Life of Trees — intricate portraits of tree-spirits based on ancient Gond mythology, painted by three of the most celebrated living Gond artists and silk-screened by hand using traditional Indian dyes — these wondrous sylvan visions come ablaze anew in a set of black-and-white prints, consummately detailed and alive, silk-screened on handmade paper made of locally sourced cotton waste.  The Antler Tree  The Leaf Tree The prints, like everything Tara Books make, support their community of artists, craftspeople, and storytellers, some of whom are illiterate, many self-taught, most women, and all devoted to the preservation and celebration of the ancient folk art traditions that have rooted numberless generations into a reverence of the natural world and our relationship with it.  The Allegory Tree  The Blackbird Tree Leap across epochs and cultures to complement these visual venerations with Mary Oliver's prayerful tree poem and Pablo Neruda's prose serenade to the forest, then revisit other treasures from Tara Books: Sun and Moon, a collection of Indian celestial myths illustrated by ten of the country's finest indigenous artists; Creation, a visual cosmogony of origin myths by one of the Gond artists behind The Night Life of Trees; Waterlife, an exquisite illustrated encyclopedia of marine creatures from Indian folklore; Beasts of India, a bestiary of indigenous animals depicted in various tribal traditions; and the boundlessly gladsome Hope Is a Girl Selling Fruit. 
"All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up," John Steinbeck wrote to his best friend on New Year's Day 1941, as the world was coming undone by its deadliest war. "It isn't that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn't die." It is a sentiment both lucid and noble, springing from one of humanity's most humanistic minds. It is also an incomplete sentiment, for the dichotomy is not between good and evil but within the totality of being — something James Baldwin captured two decades and myriad miniature wars later in his staggering observation that "it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within." A century before Baldwin, Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844–August 25, 1900) explored the complexity and nuance of this disquieting fundament of human nature in his 1886 book Beyond Good and Evil (free ebook | public library).  Friedrich Nietzsche Composed of 296 numbered arguments, organized into nine thematic parts, and concluding with an epode, or aftersong, titled "From High Mountains," this unyawning awakening of a book builds on the ideas Nietzsche had explored three years earlier from a more poetic angle in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, now examined with a pointed critical sensibility. It is at bottom a gauntlet to dogma, challenging the epochs-old notion of morality as the mere opposition of good and evil. The good person, Nietzsche argues as he hurls classical philosophy into discomposure and lays the groundwork for contemporary moral philosophy, behavioral economics, and social psychology, is not the opposite of the evil person; good and evil, rather, are different expressions of the same nature, which bubble to the surface by complex and nuanced currents of potentiality and choice. In the seventy-second argument, Nietzsche — translated here by Helen Zimmern in the early twentieth century when his works were first published in English, and writing in an era when every woman was "man," — extols the power of perseverance over the power of vehemence: It is not the strength, but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men. Two sentiments later, he supplements this with another necessity of greatness: A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess at least two things besides: gratitude and purity. While Nietzsche places the active opposition to evil at the heart of the good, he admonishes that the preservation of this crucial purity, this hallmark of greatness, is an immense and delicate responsibility requiring constant vigilance over one's own heart: He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.  Art by Harry Clarke for a rare 1919 edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination. (Available as a print.) In the one sentence that best distills the essence of his entire book, his entire moral cosmogony, Nietzsche offers the ultimate — the only — charm against the transfiguration of heroism into monstrosity, the one elixir of moral might that at once fuels the fight of good against evil and subsumes it: What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil. In the same era, animated by the same conviction as he was revolutionizing art, Vincent van Gogh was exclaiming in a letter to his brother that "whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done!" Complement this fragment of Nietzsche's abidingly insightful and, in particular times such as ours, increasingly relevant Beyond Good and Evil with Hannah Arendt's classic inquiry into the only effective antidote to evil and Susan Sontag on what it means to be a good human being, then revisit Nietzsche on the journey of becoming who you are, why a fulfilling life requires embracing rather than running from difficulty, the true value of education, depression and the rehabilitation of hope, the power of music, the power of language, and his brilliant thought experiment about the key to existential contentment. donating=lovingEvery week since 2006, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy and solace in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. (If you've had a change of heart or circumstance and wish to rescind your support, you can do so at this link.) monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | | | | | Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 | | IF YOU MISSED IT: | | | | |
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