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By Maria Popova
“One can by no means be alone sufficient to write down,” Susan Sontag lamented in her diary. “Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou artwork to unique thought!” the founding father of neuroscience exulted in contemplating the perfect surroundings for inventive breakthrough.
All inventive folks, nevertheless public or performative their work could also be, yearn for that contemplative area the place the thoughts quiets and the spirit quickens. The continued problem of the inventive life is how one can stability the outward sharing of 1’s present with the inward stewardship of the soul from which that present springs.
Learn how to grasp that delicate stability is what Dutch author-illustrator duo Marc Veerkamp and Jeska Verstegen discover in Bear Is By no means Alone (public library), translated by Laura Watkinson.
In the midst of the forest, Piano Bear is performing for a rapt and ravenous viewers insatiable for his music.
As all of the creatures’ enjoyment of his present for lovely music metastasizes into a requirement, Piano Bear begins craving for stillness and solitude. However in every single place he turns, the opposite animals observe with their incessant incantation of “MORE!”
Lastly, pushed to his limits, Piano Bear startles the forest with an important huge roar of exasperation, then instantly curls up right into a ball of shyness.
Simply as he thinks he’s finally alone, Piano Bear notices a quiet presence that has been there within the crowd all alongside — a lone zebra striped together with her personal present: phrases.
As a token of gratitude for all the gorgeous music she has been silently having fun with, the zebra gives to learn Piano Bear a narrative. Cautious at first of one other intrusion, he involves see that there’s nice pleasure in a shared solitude — a testomony to Rilke’s insistence that the very best activity of a bond between two souls is for every to “stand guard over the solitude of the opposite.”
Couple Bear Is By no means Alone with Maya Angelou on our accountability to our presents, then revisit Hermann Hesse on solitude as the trail to future and Could Sarton’s beautiful ode to the artwork of being alone.
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