Art has the power to move us from reactivity and despair to a place of calmness and resilience. That’s why we need it more than ever now. A few weeks ago Denver photographer Lauri Rose Dunn started creating a series of mandalas—one for every day of the coronavirus epidemic.
“Every week, New Yorkers transform their homes into pop-up concert halls. Accomplished performers gather for small, but avid audiences whose pay-for-play attendance supports any number of worthy not-for-profit causes. This is music at its local and most intimate best—beautiful sound with a powerful purpose.”
What makes a person amass so many unusual objects and how does a real collection begin? It may start as a whim or a passion that, over time, begins to build. Orhan Pamuk, author of The Museum of Innocence, says, “Getting attached to objects is a common thing..In our attachments we almost behave like dogs who keep their bones in a corner.”
There is much sweeping of the outdoor dust in Cairo, leaving patterns from the long-stranded brooms on the narrow streets and sidewalks. Outside the city, at the Saqqara, I once watched a young man sweeping the sand before the tomb of the vizier Mereruka with this same long broom.
We regard any change in the home—whether it’s downsizing, renovating or reorganizing—as a rite of passage, a fresh start that comes with a built-in guarantee of happiness like finding a new career or falling in love. Yet these activities are fluid, rich, expansive, and our approach to the home has grown perfectionistic and restrictive.
A report in The Lancet shows that during a quarantine, boredom and isolation bring on psychological distress, especially among teens and young adults. Yet you can turn that around by teaching them what everyone knew a generation or two before the internet: Solitude is the best breeding ground for creativity, and boredom is the mother of invention.
Feminist writer Anna de Noialles set the trend for the ultra-quiet writer’s den. Marcel Proust, followed suit, writing his novels in a sound-proof room.
Some writers do their best work when they withdraw from society, working in a kind of fevered isolation.
December is a time of stress and over-indulgence, shopping madness, traffic jams and holiday blues. How do we manage to enjoy the season and keep our spirits bright? The best way is to hunker down at home.
How does an artist adapt to a new country? Sara Evans explores Gustave Baumann’s move to New Mexico and his woodcuts from the 1930s in a lavish new book from Rizzoli.