In their exceptionally readable book, The Runaway Species (2017), David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt offer four suggestions for cultivating creativity: • Don’t glue down the pieces. “We don’t just set out to improve imperfection—we also tamper with things that seem perfect” (134). • Proliferate options. “When the brain proliferates options, it gets off the path of least… Continue reading

  “Listening to music on a smartphone is not like listening to music on a Walkman. Again, the phone’s functions undermines one another. We are perennially subject to interruptions and temptations. Dead time—waiting for the bus, waiting in line, and so on—is filled by checking Facebook instead of letting our minds wander. While the Walkman… Continue reading

  “Music is what man owes to time” (85). “It is possible that listening to music consists less in distracting be mind from ‘acoustic suffering’ than in struggling to reestablish animal alert. What characterizes harmony is that it resuscitates the acoustic curiosity that is lost as soon as articulated and semantic language spreads within us”… Continue reading

“You must try to remember whether even in childhood you felt a strong natural inclination to this art and whether you were deeply moved by the beauty of concords.” – Johann Joseph Fux, The Study of Counterpoint (1725) Continue reading

“Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: ‘binding back’, ‘binding’ to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being).” – Notes, 1964-65 • “Art is the highest form of hope.” – Text for catalog of documents 7, Kassel, 1982 • Question: And what is it that connects… Continue reading

“Not change, but transformation.” – Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard, p. 15 Continue reading

“The contemplative life remains freely available to us though our choices—what we read and buy, how we commit to leisure and self-improvement, the passing over of empty temptation, our preservation of the quiet spaces, and intentional striving to become the masters of our mastery.”* – Franklin Foer, World Without Mind (2017), p. 232 (*In his… Continue reading

In his forward to The Best American Essays (2015), series editor Robert Atwan suggests some stylistic attributes of the essay form. Ideally, essays: • foreground the writing process in the writing itself • allow the author to reject any authoritative posture • are an anti-systematic, anti-rhetorical method of composition • are prose with an unfinished… Continue reading

“I used to try to listen my way under my skin, but it turned out that listening was my skin. Listening to records was not just something I did, it was who I was. Not a day passed, for years, that I didn’t spend hours sitting in front of my stereo or burrowing into my… Continue reading