I miss finding a Christmas tree: the excursion, hopefully in the snow; walking up and down the assembled forest, looking so closely—too scrawny, not fat enough, crooked, ahhh—here’s one that’s perfect! Never perfect, in the literal sense, because it is real, and as flawed as we are.
“These twigs could be a Rorschach inkblot test!” I told him. “I keep seeing human figures in them. . . . ” Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist and a geneticist at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied the evolution of human creativity and pattern recognition, was not in the least bit surprised.
“It’s not really play that makes you feel good,” Csikszentmihalyi realized, “but the playfulness which can be in play.” Once you experienced that relaxed, utter absorption, you wanted to feel it again and again.
Directors (like political handlers) can hesitate to be blunt, afraid to say, “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.” Because it is safer or easier to let it ride, the mumbling is indulged.
Language fails. Cecilia, however, does not. She mixes each cocktail in perfect proportions—never a little heavy on the booze, to loosen you up, or lightly, when your request slurs.
Whenever we create structure and limitations, we are building ourselves a playground, a contained space in which it will be safe to play. That happens in an arena, a temple, a magic circle, a court of justice; at a temple; at a card table; on stage, on screen, on a tennis court.
Reading Shirley Chisholm’s 1973 book “The Good Fight” was something of a revelation for my students, as it offered not just an insider’s view of Black political thinking and organizing in the early 1970s but also a look at how a major institution like the Democratic Party operates and how difficult it is to mount what was in Chisholm’s case a true insurgent candidacy.
What really triggered this project? For four decades, ABBA steadily refused to re-form, even when offered $1 billion in cash.
We love to personalize. We have our initials embroidered on towels that will fade and thin in a year. The idea of clothing custom-tailored to our bodies—unaffordably, by a human, or now, with computerized manufacturing—thrills us. So why not make our lives our own?
Giving thanks, as Melanie Kirkpatrick reminds us, is an American preoccupation, a powerful religious and civic expression of our nation. Kirkpatrick’s fear is that the left’s attempt to banish gratitude unravels our country by denying it any dimension of humanity except its quest for power.