Flourishing consists of positive emotion, meaning, engagement, healthy relationships, and accomplishment – the success of a life well lived. The acronym is “PERMA”. This is the characterizing feature of Nettle’s third and ultimate level of happiness. Don’t focus on negative things; focus on the positive, and you will flourish. [attributed to Alek Wek] Human well-being is not a random phenomenon….
Read More
Value for Monday of Week 21 in the season of Growth
Cultivating Insights
An insight is an awakening to a particular point or fact.
- A moment’s insight is sometimes worth a life’s experience. [Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.]
- The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection. [attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]
- It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions— especially selfish ones. [Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn]
- Humor is the affectionate communication of insight. [attributed to Leo Rosten]
***
Real
True Narratives
Helen Keller was known for her brilliant mind, a mind that won her admission into Radcliffe College (a Harvard affiliate), from which she was graduated cum laude in 1904, at the age of not-quite 24. Her mind is a remarkable part of our story for many reasons, including her capacity for insight. In an early essay entitled ”Optimism” (1903), Part iii, she observed:
Dickens, Lamb, Goldsmith, Irving, all the well-beloved and gentle humorists, were optimists. Swift, the pessimist, has never had as many readers as his towering genius should command, and indeed, when he comes down into our century and meets Thackeray, that generous optimist can hardly do him justice. In spite of the latter-day notoriety of the “Rubáiyát” of Omar Khayyám, we may set it down as a rule that he who would be heard must be a believer, must have a fundamental optimism in his philosophy. He may bluster and disagree and lament as Carlyle and Ruskin do sometimes; but a basic confidence in the good destiny of life and of the world must underlie his work. Shakespeare is the prince of optimists. His tragedies are a revelation of moral order. In “Lear” and “Hamlet” there is a looking forward to something better, some one is left at the end of the play to right wrong, restore society and build the state anew. The later plays, “The Tempest” and “Cymbeline,” show a beautiful, placid optimism which delights in reconciliations and reunions and which plans for the triumph of external as well as internal good.
Her capacity to see optimism in Shakespeare’s tragedies reflects a strong and agile mind - a mind strong enough to earn her a degree from a top university, and world-wide respect to this day not only for what she overcame but also for the content of her work.
Franz Kafka, the patron saint of insight into the nightmarishly absurd:
- Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Early Years (Princeton University Press, 2016).
- Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years (Princeton University Press, 2002).
- Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight (Princeton University Press, 2013).
- Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka, The Jewish Patient (Routledge, 1995).
Other true narratives about insight:
- Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II (Hachette Books, 2017) [children’s version]: Mundy “describes the experiences of several thousand American women who spent the war years in Washington, untangling the clandestine messages sent by the Japanese and German militaries and diplomatic corps.”
- Lyndall Gordon, Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019): “Gordon is best known for her brilliant studies of Woolf, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson. As a biographer, she’s been a visionary herself, mind-reading her way into these figures’ creative processes. She displays the same insight here, reading ‘Frankenstein’ as Mary Shelley’s effort to confront her estrangement from her father, and suggesting that Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights’ may have been Emily Brontë’s embodiment of ‘Nature itself, red in tooth and claw.’”
- Alec Nevala-Lee, Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller (Dey Street Books, 2022): “A lot of paper — Nevala-Lee lists more than two dozen books in Fuller’s bibliography, ranging across geometry, cartography, education, poetry and metaphysics. Fuller’s theory of ephemeralization anticipated the digital age; his invented terms “synergy” and “Spaceship Earth” became part of the language; scientists who discovered a carbon molecule that looked like a geodesic sphere were aided by his insights . . .”
- Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), examines “the life of the Australian novelist celebrated for her refined poetic fiction and acute moral vision.”
- Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (Ecco, 2020), is “an exploration of a Black mother and daughter trying to get free in a land that conflates survival with freedom and womanhood with girlhood. It is also the story of Trethewey’s life before and after the day in 1985 when her mother was murdered by her ex-husband, Trethewey’s former stepfather, in the parking lot of her apartment complex on Atlanta’s Memorial Drive.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
- Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to Present (Random House, 2012): the book received mixed reviews, some critical of the soundness of the author’s neuroscientific claims.
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Fiction by Franz Kafka (“Kafka’s stories and novels have provoked a wealth of interpretations. Brod and Kafka’s first English translators, Edwin Muir and his wife, Willa, viewed the novels as allegories of divine grace. Existentialists have seen Kafka’s environment of guilt and despair as the ground upon which to construct an authentic existence. Some have seen his neurotic involvement with his father as the heart of his work. Others have emphasized the social criticism, the inhumanity of the powerful and their agents, the violence and barbarity that lurk beneath normal routine.”):
- Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Oxford University Press) (audiobook of The Metamorphosis).
- Franz Kafka, The Trial (1915) (audiobook of The Trial; film adaptation)
Other insightful works of fiction:
- Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife: A Novel (Random House, 2011): the author couples her childhool experiences in Yugoslavia with keen imagination and insight, creating a compelling work of fiction.
- Peter Kimani, Dance of the Jakaranda: A Novel (Akastic Books, 2017): “I grew up in Kenya, and I have never read a novel about my own country that’s so funny, so perceptive, so subversive and so sly.”
- Aravind Adiga, Amnesty: A Novel (Scribner, 2020): “No one in his novels is simple to understand. Adiga may not agree with everything that gets said or thought, but there is no gauze on his mental windshield. Nice people are often skewered, as if on kabobs. Reading him you get a sense of having your finger on the planet’s pulse.”
Poetry
That music always round me, unceasing, unbeginning, yet long
untaught I did not hear,
But now the chorus I hear and am elated,
A tenor, strong, ascending with power and health, with glad notes
of daybreak I hear,
A soprano at intervals sailing buoyantly over the tops of immense
waves,
A transparent base shuddering lusciously under and through the
universe,
The triumphant tutti, the funeral wailings with sweet flutes and
violins, all these I fill myself with,
I hear not the volumes of sound merely, I am moved by the
exquisite meanings,
I listen to the different voices winding in and out, striving, contend-
ing with fiery vehemence to excel each other in emotion;
I do not think the performers know themselves—but now I think
I begin to know them.
[Walt Whitman, “That Music Always Round Me”]
Arthur Rimbaud, an icon of insight:
- Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations, translated by John Ashbery (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011): Rimbaud was a “meteoric” young poet with “flashes of insight” “whose very eruption and subsequent accomplishments remain dazzling and difficult to explain away”. See also:
- Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations (New Directions Publishing, 1946).
- Arthur Rimbaud, The Illuminations, translated by Keith Miller (CreateSpace, 2009).
- Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library, 2002).
- Arthur Rimbaud, A Season In Hell and The Illuminations, translated by Enid Rhodes Peschel (Oxford University Press, 1973).
- Links to works by Arthur Rimbaud
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Ludwig van Beethoven’s 32 Piano Sonatas (list of recorded performances) occupy a prominent place in music history and in music-making. “Spanning several decades of his life as a composer, the sonatas soon came to be seen as the first body of substantial serious works for piano suited to performance in large concert halls seating hundreds of people.” Yet they are equally suitable for performance in more intimate settings. Covering a wide range of musical themes, they also expanded the understood range of the piano. Beethoven composed piano sonatas throughout his life as a composer. For contemporary listeners, what may stand out is that each sonata offers its own set of ideas and insights. Many of our greatest classical pianists have recorded the entire set. These include Artur Schnabel (1930s), Wilhelm Kempff (1950s), Friedrich Gulda (1960s), Richard Goode (1990s), Jonathan Biss (2000s), Stephen Kovacevich (2000s), Ronald Brautigam (2000s), Maurizio Pollini (2000s), François-Frédéric Guy (2010s), and Igor Levit (2010s).
Murray Perahia is a classical pianist known for his musical insights. “Perahia’s pianism, recognised as exceptional since his student days, has matured over more than four decades to deliver unique insights into music’s spiritual qualities, its power to communicate where words end.” He has been praised for “his stellar technique and profound insight that touches the soul . . .” Of one performance, a reviewer wrote: “A Mozart specialist, Mr. Perahia played that composer's work with the kind of insight that gives each individual note vitality.” Even when he could not play, he seems to have had a knack for finding previously unseen truths. After he injured a hand, and was unable to play, he commented: “What seemed like a curse actually turned into a blessing, because it gave me a lot of time to think about music and to listen to it more. And so I felt I was actually growing as a musician, even though I was not playing.” Here is a link to his playlists.
Rafael Kubelik was known as an insightful conductor, with Mahler’s symphonies, Schumann’s symphonies, and other works. Notable insight in a conductor is the ability to appreciate and bring forth what others miss, even other great conductors. Here is a link to Kubelik’s playlists, and a video of his conducting.
Johannes Brahms composed several series of short pieces for piano. In each piece, he explores a single musical idea:
- 16 Waltzes, Op. 39 (1865) (approx. 16-22’) (list of recorded performances)
- 18 Liebeslieder Waltzes (Love Song Waltzes) for 4 Voices and Piano 4 Hands, Op. 52, Verses from "Polydora" (1869) (approx. 25-28’) (list of recorded performances)
- 8 Klavierstücke (Piano pieces), Op. 76 (1878) (approx. 24-28’) (list of recorded performances)
- 7 Fantasies (Fantasias), Op. 116 (1892) (approx. 23-26’) (list of recorded performances)
- 3 Intermezzi for Piano, Op. 117 (1892) (approx. 15-18’) (list of recorded performances)
- 6 Klavierstücke (Piano pieces), Op. 118 (1893) (approx. 22-23’) (list of recorded performances)
- 4 Klavierstücke (Piano pieces), Op. 119 (1893) (approx. 15-16’) (list of recorded performances)
Frederic Chopin, Waltzes (1829-1847) (approx. 51-54’) (list of recorded performances) give brief expositions on discrete themes. “The waltzes are rarely found on lists of his greatest works or of performers' favorites. Yet they afford a unique opportunity to consider the wonder of his art. While most of his other morsels are free-form and deeply personal in conception, the waltzes dwell within prescribed dance forms and their social function.” Top recorded performances are by Robert Lortat in 1931, Dinu Lipatti in 1950, Ingrid Haebler in 1960, Arthur Rubinstein in 1963, Ingrid Fliter in 2009, and François Chaplin in 2022.
Other compositions:
- Giacinto Scelsi, Anahit (Poème Lyrique - dédié à Vénus) (Lyric poem dedicated to Venus) (1965) (approx. 15’) represents a transformation of sound into a higher, more nearly spiritual realm. “Anahit is the Egyptian name for Venus. The work . . . is in a single continuous movement in which ancient evenings in Thebes are fearfully evoked. There is a wailing dissonance to this music and a great thrumming of activity, a slow turning and writhing and a swaying and slaloming crawling and swinging,” “. . . Scelsi could . . . turn the same improvisation into two very different pieces. In Anahit, this results in a sort of ruffled serenity, as glowing tones generate their own sonic momentum. After the cadenza, Scelsi gathers material from the first section and lets pulsing waves move the music to a final crest.” “Anahit develops itself with an ascetic’s patience and doesn’t ever arrive at any kind of explosive climax. Instead, it hovers on the tentative edge of crisis, like a photograph of something hateful endlessly developing, out of which no clear image ever emerges. The pseudoscientific word ‘liminal’ comes to mind: of or relating to a sensory threshold, barely perceptible, on the cusp of response.”
- Alfred Schnittke, Five Aphorisms for piano (1990) (approx. 12-14’) (list of recorded performances): “. . . Schnittke . . . requested that these five pieces be individually paired with Brodsky poems of the performer's choosing, to be recited aloud before or after the music.”
- Kurt Weill, Violin Concerto, Op. 12 (1924) (approx. 28-33’) (list of recorded performances): “The work is inspired by the idea – one never carried out before – of juxtaposing a single violin with a chorus of winds.” [Weill] He also wrote: “I was stupid to give this somewhat rough, abstract, completely dissonant piece to the Dessauers, who are the most ignorant and philistine of all . . . It will be unanimously rejected. One has to have already digested a portion of Schoenberg with all good will before one can understand this music. The cynical attitude of the orchestra and the impotence of this conductor make me quite nervous . . .”
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Depeche Mode, “Insight” (lyrics)
- Richard Strauss (composer), “Im Abendrot” (At Sunset), from Four Last Songs, TrV 296 (lyrics)
Visual Arts
- Salvador Dali, The First Days of Spring (1929)
