Last updated on 8 December 2020
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This is a wonderful short film from Maria Popova’s blog, brain pickings, one of my favorite blogs. She consistently has intelligent essays on the literary life and great thinkers. I always make time to read whatever Maria posts. Click on the link to the video. This could be a nice part of your coffee break today.
How To Be Alone
by Maria Popova
Dancing with yourself, how to talk to statues, and what squirrels have to do with love.
UPDATE: Now available as an illustrated book.
Modernity offers a curious paradox of connectedness and loneliness. Our perpetually networked selves cling to constant communication in an effort to avoid the deep-seated sense of loneliness we so dread. Somewhere along the way, we forget — or maybe never even learn — how to be alone, how to stay contented in our own company.
Poet and singer-songwriter Tanya Davis and filmmaker Andrea Dorfman address this forgotten art in How To Be Alone — a beautifully hand-illustrated, simply yet eloquently narrated visual poem full of all these things we so often need to tell ourselves and believe, yet so rarely do.
How To Be Alone (link)
You could be in an instant surrounded if you needed it. If your heart is bleeding, make the best of it. There is heat in freezing, be a testament.
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With respect and appreciation for Maria Popova’s blog, here is another link to brain pickings. This piece talks about Susan Sontag’s famous interview with Rolling Stone; Sontag talks about the misconnection of love and sex: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/01/14/love-and-sex/
Enjoy.