To be a thinking, feeling, creative individual in a mass society too often unthinking and unfeeling in its conformity is to find oneself again and again at odds with the system yet impelled to make out of those odds alternative ends — to envision other landscapes of possibility, other answers, other questions yet unasked. Because that is what artists do, a certain political undertone inheres in all art. Chinua Achebe knew this when he observed in his fantastic forgotten conversation with James Baldwin: “Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art’ are not being honest. If you look very carefully you will see that they are the same people who are quite happy with the situation as it is… What they are saying is don’t upset the system.”

What it means to be an artist inside but not trapped by the system and to labor at improving it from within is what beloved poet W.H. Auden (February 21, 1907–September 29, 1973) examines in one of the thirty-four splendid essays in his indispensable 1962 collection The Dyer’s Hand (public library), which also gave us Auden on writing, originality, and how to be a good reader and what it really means to be a scholar.

Auden begins with a taxonomy of social formations:

A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.

A mob is active; it smashes, kills and sacrifices itself. The public is passive or, at most, curious. It neither murders nor sacrifices itself; it looks on, or looks away, while the mob beats up a Negro or the police round up Jews for the gas ovens.

The public is the least exclusive of clubs; anybody, rich or poor, educated or unlettered, nice or nasty, can join it: it even tolerates a pseudo revolt against itself, that is, the formation within itself of clique publics.

Today, these clique-based pseudo revolts have reached a pinnacle in identity politics. Echoing Nobel laureate Elias Canetti’s foundational insight into the power of crowds and the paradox of why we join them, Auden adds:

In a crowd, passion like rage or terror is highly contagious; each member of a crowd excites all the others, so that passion increases at a geometric rate. But among members of the Public, there is no contact. If two members of the public meet and speak to each other, the function of their words is not to convey meaning or arouse passion but to conceal by noise the silence and solitude of the void in which the Public exists.

Occasionally, the Public embodies itself in a crowd and so becomes visible — in the crowd, for example, which collects to watch the wrecking gang demolish the old family mansion, fascinated by yet another proof that physical force is the Prince of this world against whom no love of the heart shall prevail.

Art by Ben Shahn from On Nonconformity

Nearly a century after Oscar Wilde proclaimed that “a true artist takes no notice whatever of the public” and more than a century and half after Germaine de Staël’s bold assertion that “contemporary glory is submitted to [the public’s] decision, for it is characterised by the enthusiasm of the multitude, [whereas] real merit is independent of everything,” Auden considers how the emergence of the capital-P Public and its modern ventriloquist, the mass media, has abraded the essence of true art:

Before the phenomenon of the Public appeared in society, there existed naïve art and sophisticated art which were different from each other but only in the way that two brothers are different. The Athenian court may smile at the mechanics’ play of Pyramus and Thisbe, but they recognize it as a play. Court poetry and Folk poetry were bound by the common tie that both were made by hand and both were intended to last; the crudest ballad was as custom-built as the most esoteric sonnet. The appearance of the Public and the mass media which cater to it have destroyed naïve popular art. The sophisticated “highbrow” artist survives and can still work as he did a thousand years ago, because his audience is too small to interest the mass media. But the audience of the popular artist is the majority and this the mass media must steal from him if they are not to go bankrupt. Consequently, aside from a few comedians, the only art today is “highbrow.” What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. This is bad for everyone; the majority lose all genuine taste of their own, and the minority become cultural snobs.

In consonance with Achebe, Auden suggests that because all genuine art arises from a rebellion against the tyranny of conformity, all art is inescapably political. In an incisive dichotomy, he examines what “political” really means:

There are two kinds of political issues, Party issues and Revolutionary issues. In a party issue, all parties are agreed as to the nature and justice of the social goal to be reached, but differ in their policies for reaching it. The existence of different parties is justified, firstly, because no party can offer irrefutable proof that its policy is the only one which will achieve the commonly desired goal and, secondly, because no social goal can be achieved without some sacrifice of individual or group interest and it is natural for each individual and social group to seek a policy which will keep its sacrifice to a minimum, to hope that, if sacrifices must be made, it would be more just if someone else made them. In a party issue, each party seeks to convince the members of its society, primarily by appealing to their reason; it marshals facts and arguments to convince others that its policy is more likely to achieve the desired goal than that of its opponents. On a party issue it is essential that passions be kept at a low temperature: effective oratory requires, of course, some appeal to the emotions of the audience, but in party politics orators should display the mock-passion of prosecuting and defending attorneys, not really lose their tempers. Outside the Chamber, the rival deputies should be able to dine in each other’s houses; fanatics have no place in party politics.

In a passage of astonishing prescience, he contrasts party issues with other — and far more consequential — kind of political issues:

A revolutionary issue is one in which different groups within a society hold different views as to what is just. When this is the case, argument and compromise are out of the question; each group is bound to regard the other as wicked or mad or both. Every revolutionary issue is potentially a casus belli. On a revolutionary issue, an orator cannot convince his audience by appealing to their reason; he may convert some of them by awakening and appealing to their conscience, but his principal function, whether he represent the revolutionary or the counterrevolutionary group, is to abuse its passion to the point where it will give all its energies to achieving total victory for itself and total defeat for its opponents. When an issue is revolutionary, fanatics are essential.

Writing three decades after W.E.B. Du Bois and Albert Einstein’s little-known correspondence about “the evil of race prejudice in the world” and just after Dr. King’s timeless insistence that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Auden adds:

Today, there is only one genuine world-wide revolutionary issue, racial equality.

One of W.E.B. Du Bois’s pioneering modernist data visualizations of African American life.

Echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s conviction that it is the artist’s task to liberate the present from the past and James Baldwin’s immortal assertion that “a society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven,” Auden returns to the artist’s task as a force of wakefulness for regime-tranquilized society:

Every artist feels himself at odds with modern civilization.

In our age, the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act. So long as artists exist, making what they please and think they ought to make, even if it is not terribly good, even if it appeals to only a handful of people, they remind the Management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous numbers, that Homo Laborans is also Homo Ludens.

The Dyer’s Hand is an abidingly rewarding read in its totality. Complement this particular portion with Denise Levertov on the artist’s task to awaken society’s sleepers, Adrienne Rich on the political power of poetry, Robert Penn Warren on art and democracy, and John F. Kennedy on the artist’s role as an antidote to corruption, then revisit Auden on belief, doubt, and the most important principle in making art.

In her stunning poem “Planetarium,” Adrienne Rich wrote of translating “pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.” Poetry itself is the work of such mind-reconstructing translation, its images making comprehensible the most ineffable pulsations of thought and feeling. So is science, translating the abstractions of sensation and perception into a relief of concrete truths.

Occupying the embodied space between poetry and science is This Book Is a Planetarium (public library) by Brooklyn-based artist and designer Kelli Anderson — a wondrous pop-up masterpiece that translates the laws of physics, from light to time, into magical hands-on demonstrations that make tangible and concretely comprehensible the abstract forces and phenomena we experience daily but cannot ordinarily touch.

Using nothing but paper and human ingenuity, Anderson — a poet of prototyping and a virtuosic explorer of the wonders hidden in everyday things — demonstrates the principles at the heart of cryptography in a decoder ring, the science of sound in a papercraft musical instrument and a pop-up speaker, the measurement of time based on Earth’s orbital period in a perpetual calendar.

Place a smartphone inside the pop-up planetarium and it will illuminate the annual rotation of constellations in the night sky. Slip a piece of paper into the spiralgraph sleeve and press a pencil down into the gear-wheel to produce the irregular but mathematically predictable line known as an epicycloid.

Accompanying each lyrical pop-up delight is a succinct explanation of the science behind it and why it works.

Here is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the book and the marvelous mind from which it sprang:

This Book Is a Planetarium is immeasurably delightful in its totality, an achievement of elaborate engineering that feels somehow as spare and precise as a poem. Complement it with a very different pop-up masterpiece about the ultimate forces of life by Japanese artist Katsumi Komagata and a vintage pop-up book about the life of Leonardo, whose dual enchantment of art and science Anderson carries on into the twenty-first century.

“Human beings make metaphors as naturally as bees make honey,” Adam Gopnik wrote in his wondrous love letter to winter, and no one has honeyed the spirit with more splendid metaphors wrung from winter than Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–May 6, 1862).

Long before he contemplated winter cabbage as a lesson in optimism, Thoreau explored winter’s rapturous yet overlooked rewards in a stunning, meandering meditation titled “A Winter Walk,” included in his indispensable Excursions (free ebook | public library).

Writing in the winter of 1843, shortly after Margaret Fuller’s mentorship made him a writer, the twenty-five-year-old Thoreau awakens to a snow-covered wonderland and marvels at the splendor — a singularly earthly splendor — of a world reborn:

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, — the only sound awake twixt Venus and Mars, — advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

We sleep, and at length awake to the still reality of a winter morning. The snow lies warm as cotton or down upon the window-sill; the broadened sash and frosted panes admit a dim and private light, which enhances the snug cheer within.

Art by Isabelle Arsenault from Once Upon a Northern Night by Jean E. Pendziwol

This quieting of the outside world, this kindling of the inner hearth, is indeed winter’s greatest reward for Thoreau. A century before Albert Camus wrested from the seasons his immortal metaphor for the human spirit — “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” — Thoreau writes:

There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill…. What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a winter’s day, when the meadow mice come out by the wallsides, and the chicadee lisps in the defiles of the wood? The warmth comes directly from the sun, and is not radiated from the earth, as in summer; and when we feel his beams on our backs as we are treading some snowy dell, we are grateful as for a special kindness, and bless the sun which has followed us into that by-place.

This subterranean fire has its altar in each man’s breast, for in the coldest day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveller cherishes a warmer fire within the folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A healthy man, indeed, is the complement of the seasons, and in winter, summer is in his heart. There is the south. Thither have all birds and insects migrated, and around the warm springs in his breast are gathered the robin and the lark.

Art by Alessandro Sanna from The River.

Thoreau believed that “every walk is a sort of crusade.” As he walks through the meadows blanketed in white, up the hills draped with snow-bowed branches, through a world enveloped in delicious quietude and covered in a “pure elastic heaven,” he returns to the invaluable inward focus which winter alone invites — a quiet conquest of one’s interior world. A century before Rilke painted winter as the season for tending to one’s inner garden, Thoreau writes:

In this lonely glen, with its brook draining the slopes, its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces and hemlocks stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats in the rivulet itself, our lives are more serene and worthy to contemplate.

[…]

In winter we lead a more inward life. Our hearts are warm and cheery, like cottages under drifts, whose windows and doors are half concealed, but from whose chimneys the smoke cheerfully ascends.

He revisits the subject in a series of diary entires from The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861 (public library) — the trove of wisdom that gave us Thoreau on writing, the sacredness of public libraries, and the creative benefits of keeping a diary. On Christmas Day of 1856, he issues an exhortation central to his philosophy and his daily practice:

Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.

Four days later, Thoreau amplifies the fervor of his point:

We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day. We must make root, send out some little fibre at least, even every winter day. I am sensible that I am imbibing health when I open my mouth to the wind. Staying in the house breeds a sort of insanity always. Every house is in this sense a hospital. A night and a forenoon is as much confinement to those wards as I can stand. I am aware that I recover some sanity which I had lost almost the instant that I come [outdoors].

Art by Princesse Camcam from Fox’s Garden

The following week, as New England lurches into one of the harshest winters ever recorded, Thoreau reflects on how withdrawing from “the wearying and unprofitable world of affairs” and into the sanity-restoring world of the winter wilderness cleanses him of society’s impurities and trifles:

The things I have been doing have but a fleeting and accidental importance, however much men are immersed in them, and yield very little valuable fruit. I would fain have been wading through the woods and fields and conversing with the sane snow. I thus from time to time break off my connection with eternal truths and go with the shallow stream of human affairs, grinding at the mill of the Philistines; but when my task is done, with never-failing confidence I devote myself to the infinite again.

[…]

There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it, — dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

[…]

I wish to forget, a considerable part of every day, all mean, narrow, trivial men (and this requires usually to forego and forget all personal relations so long), and therefore I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified.

Complement this particular portion of the timelessly rewarding Journal of Henry David Thoreau with Annie Dillard on how winter awakens us to life, then revisit Thoreau on the greatest gift of growing old, the difference between an artisan, an artist, and a genius, the only worthwhile definition of success, and how to use civil disobedience to advance justice.

You might recall Black Hole Blues by astrophysicist Janna Levin — the definitive account of the most illuminating astrophysical discovery since Galileo first pointed his telescope at the cosmos — as one of my favorite science books of the year. (It is also one of my absolute favorite books of any era and any genre.) Dr. Levin now has a fascinating new documentary about black holes, Black Hole Apocalypse — the first feature in the 44-year history of PBS's Nova science documentaries to be hosted by a woman. It is free to steam on the PBS website for two weeks and well worth watching.