A list of beautiful things #30

on the diaries and photographs of our parents

A drawing from Lillian X. Zhao’s illustration series, “On Prayer,” in which she attempts to give shape to the meaning and feeling of prayer. “In the end, I still cannot share with you what prayer means to me, because it is quickly becoming unknown to me,” they write in Seventh Wave Magazine. I like this illustration because the way it was drawn looks as meditative as the concept.

• How Galileo depicted his little stars and constellations.

• If you would like to get in touch with your deeper self and are not sure where to enter, here are the doors.

• Japanese photographer Rika Noguchi uncovered decades of her father’s old photographs of her, and here’s what she found.

• Writer Timothy White always wondered what his father thought of him being gay, and finally found the answer after reading his old diaries. (Gift article)

• An Irish poet looks at her dying mother through the lens of an old photograph.

• “From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity.” Just read the first paragraph, it conjures such a delightful picture. Then ask yourself: What is your favorite time of day, in which season, doing what ritual? (Gift article) Here is a painting to go with that passage.

• Wow, this has to be one of my favorite films of the year. It’s about friendship, aging, memory, ambition and lost dreams.

• A newly discovered Robert Frost poem, published for the first time in The New Yorker’s 100-year anniversary issue, is short enough to memorize. Critic Jay Parini wonders about that last line. See the handwritten version of it here.

• “How strange! How ironic! Just because a man has been created on the Equator some mad people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean? Where the middle way?” From Season of Migration to the North, a thought-provoking book on empire and identity.

• “Unassimilability is a proposition to refuse to belong here altogether, together. [It’s] less about proving ourselves to Whiteness and more about holding it accountable while divesting from it altogether.” Thank you Bianca Mabute-Louie for giving me a new, radical way to think about my identity.

• Less common colors in Arabic. I love this one: ashhab. It means gray, dun, ashen, and used to describe the color of bears. The word sounds like the color.

• Yukiko Noritake’s acrylic paintings of Paris are a dream.

And some little things from me:

• I’m teaching two-hour virtual classes in March! Sign up now.

  • How to use journalism skills to write memoir, 7-9PM CT, March 4, $60

  • How to write and draw a graphic memoir, 7-9PM CT, March 25, $60

• Journal questions if you feel uncertain about your future.

• How to turn your emotions into action.

• I did the Proust Questionnaire with my 97-year-old grandmother.