The beginning of one of Napoléon Bonaparte’s earliest letters to Joséphine de Beauharnais simply oozes sensuality: “Seven in the morning. I awaken full of you…the…
View More Transitory SpacesTag: libraries
Spending time in research libraries is a passion of mine, one I exercise as often as I can. The research I find informs my writing here tremendously.
One of my favorites is the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University (it has its own tag here on The Diary of an Improvateur), which I’ve visited many times and have found some life lessons among the papers of some heavyweight writers. I’ve combed through boxes papers belonging to Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edmund Wilson, Edith Wharton, Henry Miller and Petrarch (yes, Petrarch!).
The remarkable men and women who’ve left literary legacies I would like to emulate are teaching me about more than writing as I sift through their lives; they are illuminating some remarkable lessons about living. This doesn’t mean I see them as pinnacles of psychological health—quite a few of them were some of the most tortured people who’ve ever lived. I am keen on sharing what I learn here on the blog so you can click on this tag to see what awareness I have unearthed!
Heaven Shall Be Here
In the film A Little Chaos, Alan Rickman, who plays an unlikely Louis XIV, declares, “Heaven shall be here.” He’s speaking of a ballroom he…
View More Heaven Shall Be HereHow to Set a Mood
The 1968 version of The Thomas Crown Affair starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway is a mercurial mélange of masculine and feminine charisma in equal…
View More How to Set a MoodCelebrating Shakespeare
Celebrating Shakespeare The 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death is April 23rd, the date he passed in 1616 at the age of 52 believed to…
View More Celebrating ShakespeareIt Is Time to Experience More
Experience more. It sounds like a simple directive but how many of us really take the time to savor what is happening right in front…
View More It Is Time to Experience MoreI Met Virginia Woolf in This Room
Who else is relieved that Lady Edith Crawley, played by Laura Carmichael, is finally finding happiness on Downton Abbey? Having binged on all of the…
View More I Met Virginia Woolf in This RoomWhat Is Art?
“It is assumed that everyone knows and understands what is meant by the word beauty,” Leo Tolstoy wrote. “And yet not only is this not…
View More What Is Art?Through the Looking Glass into Devon
Through the Looking Glass Into Devon “‘What is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’” “What is the use of a…
View More Through the Looking Glass into DevonNarratives That Illuminate Design
Narratives That Illuminate Design If you believe that design-centric coffee table books contain nothing more than visual surveys of portfolios, I am out to change…
View More Narratives That Illuminate DesignThe Red Carpet Treatment
There is a momentum to writing that, once interrupted, is challenging to reboot. I’ve experienced this first-hand during the past two months as I have…
View More The Red Carpet Treatment