Which Books Formed You?

Weekly wisdom to level up your creative life in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

I can still remember where I took this photo.

I was sitting on a train platform in Pontedera, Italy in the spring of 2006 after seeing my now dear friend Mario Biagini in Action — a theater piece he worked on with his colleagues daily for 12 years at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotwoski and Thomas Richards — that forever changed the way I viewed theater.

At the same time, I was encountering Joseph Campbell for the first time and beginning to dream about my own future hero journeys.

The reason I share this now is because I recently read an incredibly researched article by Marc Andreesen on Why AI Will Save the World, which inspired me to expand my reading list.

Franz Kafka once wrote a letter to a friend defining the books that are worth reading. He said, “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?”

He said, “We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

Kafka was expressing (albeit very dramatically) an important idea: books form us. They make us who we are. They break us open and reveal a new a way of seeing the world.

For myself, I think of Man’s Search for Meaning, The Moral Animal, A Joseph Campbell Companion, Mary Oliver’s Devotions, Chris Abani’s Kalakuta Republic, The Bhagavad Gita, Letters to a Young Poet, Hamlet, and so much more.  

I also feel the same way about theater. Where would I be without the performances of Simon Russell Beale’s Leontes in A Winter’s Tale, The Jungle, Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Death of a Salesman, Mark Rylance in Jerusalem, and Mario Biagini in Action?

What books or performances formed you? What lessons from them do you still carry with you? And do you ever look back and wonder if you would have been the same if they hadn’t come into your life at that exact moment?

A CREATIVE TOOL

AI Voice Generators are becoming more and more advanced. Essentially, with enough recordings to train for an AI Model, you can replicate your voice to basically say anything you want.

Astonishing and frightening, at the same time!

Check out this recently launched tool that is by far the most impressive.

Here is a video I created back in 2020 when this technology was just getting off the ground, amazing to see how much things have changed since then!

A PIECE OF ART

Portrait in Nightshade and Delayed Translation by C. Dale Young

Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 19, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

In Saint Petersburg, on an autumn morning,
having been allowed an early entry
to the Hermitage, my family and I wandered
the empty hallways and corridors, virtually every space

adorned with famous paintings and artwork.
There must be a term for overloading on art.
One of Caravaggio’s boys smirked at us,
his lips a red that betrayed a sloppy kiss

recently delivered, while across the room
the Virgin looked on with nothing but sorrow.
Even in museums, the drama is staged.
Bored, I left my family and, steered myself,

foolish moth, toward the light coming
from a rotunda. Before me, the empty stairs.
Ready to descend, ready to step outside
into the damp and chilly air, I felt

the centuries-old reflex kick in, that sense
of being watched. When I turned, I found
no one; instead, I was staring at The Return
of the Prodigal Son. I had studied it, written about it

as a student. But no amount of study could have
prepared me for the size of it, the darkness of it.
There, the son knelt before his father, his dirty foot
left for inspection. Something broke. As clichéd

as it sounds, something inside me broke, and
as if captured on film, I found myself slowly sinking
to my knees. The tears began without warning until soon
I was sobbing. What reflex betrays one like this?

What nerve agent did Rembrandt hide
within the dark shades of paint that he used?
What inside me had malfunctioned, had left me
kneeling and sobbing in a museum?

Prosto plakat. Prosto plakat. Osvobodi sebya
said the guard as his hands steadied my shoulders.
He stood there repeating the phrase until
I stopped crying, until I was able to rise.

I’m not crazy, nor am I a very emotional man.
For most of my life, I have been called, correctly, cold.
As a student, I catalogued the techniques, carefully
analyzed this painting for a class on the “Dutch Masters.”

Years later, having mustered the courage to tell
this ridiculous story, a friend who spoke Russian
translated the guard’s words for me: “Just cry. Just cry.
Free yourself.” But free myself from what, exactly?

You see, I want this whole thing to be something
meaningful, my falling to my knees in front of a painting
by Rembrandt, a painting inspired by a parable
of forgiveness offered by a father to his lost son.

But nothing meaningful has presented itself. Even now,
after so much time has passed, I have no clue
what any of this means. I still haven’t figured out
whether or not I am the lost son or the found.

Grateful,

Michael