{"id":12078,"date":"2025-12-13T19:53:50","date_gmt":"2025-12-13T23:53:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/favorite-books-of-2025-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-12-13T19:53:50","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T23:53:50","slug":"favorite-books-of-2025-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/favorite-books-of-2025-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Favorite Books of 2025 \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

Because I read for the same reason I write \u2014 to fathom my life and deepen my living \u2014 looking back on a year of life has always been<\/a> looking back on a year of reading. Here are the books I read this year that clarified and magnified my life, that will stay with me for the rest of it. <\/p>\n

THANKS<\/h5>\n

<\/a>Here we are, living these lives bright and perishable as a poppy, hard and shimmering as obsidian. We know that they are entirely improbable<\/a>, that we bless that bright improbability<\/a> with each flash of gratitude for it all, that if we pay attention closely and generously enough we are always repaid in gladness, that it is the handle of the door to the world. And yet over and over we choose to live in the cage of complaint, too preoccupied with how the will of life betrayed our wishes, the wanting monster<\/a> always growling in the other corner of the cage. <\/p>\n

Imagine parting the bars and stepping out. Imagine waking up with a rush of gladness at everything we were never promised but got anyway \u2014 trees and music, clouds and consciousness, the cobalt eye of the scallop<\/a>, the golden fan of the gingko<\/a>, the alabaster chandelier of the ghost pipe<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In our age of competitive prostration, this is a headstand hard to hold for long. But it is trainable. It is possible to become strong enough to be tender, it is. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Artist and poet Rachel H\u00e9bert offers a bright patch of training ground in The Book of Thanks: A Catalogue of Gratitudes<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u2014 one of the most miraculous books I have ever encountered, trembling with tenacious tenderness for the bewilderment of being alive. <\/p>\n

Radiating from the pages is an invitation, extended in paintings and poems, to open \u201cthe sunlit fort of your attention\u201d and let the world rush in, in all its minute and majestic loveliness: stalactites and Spanish moss, spiderwebs and skylights, snow and the call of the snowy owl, the heart\u2019s capacity for \u201can urgent, flashing, interrupting kind of love.\u201d <\/p>\n

What emerges is prayerful (\u201cmore cellos, touch, and rain, please\u201d) and singing with praise (\u201croots gripping, canyon carved, spine woven of baleen a thousand years old\u201d) \u2014 a manual for how to live in gratitude (\u201cwhat is working wants your praise\u201d) and a theological statement (\u201cthere is nothing you must do to belong\u201d).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

She writes:<\/p>\n

\n

What do we say to longing?<\/p>\n

If you have sat in the chill
of early morning bleakness<\/p>\n

and watched as the deep blue
sighed and blushed, touched<\/p>\n

by the warm curve of dawn
and pinker than pink then<\/p>\n

apricot soft and spreading its
glow, you know. You know.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read and see more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

WILLARD GIBBS: THE WHOLE IS SIMPLER THAN ITS PARTS<\/h5>\n

<\/a>A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary \u2014 the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother\u2019s eyes exist. That out of such solitude and such strangeness one mind can touch another, touch a constellation of others, touch the spirit of its time and the soul of the future \u2014 this is the great miracle that makes the loneliness bearable and life more alive.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,\u201d Muriel Rukeyser<\/a> begins her book-length prose poem about the creative spirit, anchored in the life and legacy of the forgotten scientist whom Einstein considered the greatest mind America ever produced. Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u2014 the inaugural title in Marginalian Editions<\/a> \u2014 is a benediction of science, democracy, and the imagination, disguised as a biography of a lonely forgotten genius who shaped the modern world: \u201ca phantom of science to haunt inventors who did not know his name, to overreach dimension touching history and touching art\u201d; a mind that unraveled the mysteries of matter by following \u201cthe imperative in his loneliness, the creative loneliness of the impelled spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rukeyser writes:<\/p>\n

\n

All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences \u2014 all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

THE GRAMMAR OF FANTASY<\/h5>\n

<\/a>I was eight when I first grasped the power of storytelling. One night, my mother presented me with a book titled Telephone Tales<\/em><\/a>, published the year she was born. Night after night, page after page, it cast an enchantment, but it was one particular story that kept me up. \u201cThe Air Vendor\u201d was a cautionary fable about a man who devised a way to bottle and sell air, until everyone on Earth had no choice but to become his customer in order to keep breathing. <\/p>\n

Just a few years earlier, young idealists high on the dream of democracy \u2014 my parents among them \u2014 had finally torn down Bulgaria\u2019s forty-year dictatorship, only to watch the tyranny of capitalism replace the tyranny of communism, one kind of propaganda supplanting another with a sudden explosion of storefronts selling every imaginable commodity, bottling water and branding bread, packaging things in shiny tinfoil emblazoned with words like \u201chappiness,\u201d \u201chealth,\u201d and \u201clove.\u201d <\/p>\n

I read \u201cThe Air Vendor\u201d over and over, delighting in the shimmering sentences, shuddering at the logical progression I sensed between the reality I was living in and this fantastical world of breath for sale. I knew nothing about politics, but I could tell that someone with a deep heart and a sensitive mind was trying to warn us about something menacing, to invigorate our imagination so that we may envision and enact a different course. I knew nothing about the author, except that he had died just a few years before I was born and that his name was Gianni Rodari<\/strong> (October 23, 1920\u2013April 14, 1980).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Gianni Rodari in his classroom<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I now know that he was born on the shores of an Italian mountain lake in the wake of the First World War and that he was eight himself when his father, a baker, died suddenly. There is no record of what happened, only that the young boy took solace in solitude and music. He sang in the church choir, mastered a small orchestra of instruments, and dreamt of becoming a professional musician. <\/p>\n

But then he discovered Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky and Novalis (\u201cbooks written with the passion, chaos, and satisfaction that are a hundred times more fruitful for one\u2019s studies than a hundred years of school,\u201d he would later recount); discovered Dadaism and Futurism, the German Romantics and the French Surrealists; discovered the symphonic power of ideas and imaginative literature, the way language can liberate and words can empower. <\/p>\n

Although he never stopped playing his violin, he became a professional storyteller instead, his work touching generations in a living testament to his American contemporary Maurice Sendak\u2019s insight that great stories have \u201cthe shape of music.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n

Having worked as an elementary school teacher since he was only a teenager, having watched his country\u2019s spirit shatter under the fist of fascism, Rodari yearned for a way to unite his passions for philosophy, teaching, and justice. And so he started writing stories, songs, and poems for children, insisting over and over, in subtle and sensitive ways, on the human capacity for independent and imaginative thinking. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

One early spring in his early forties, he was invited to conduct a week of workshops on storytelling for about fifty kindergarten, elementary, and high school teachers \u2014 a week he would later remember as one of the happiest of his life. Tasked with distilling everything he knew about what makes a great story based on his fifteen years of teaching and writing for children, he suddenly remembered a notebook he had kept many years earlier under the title Notes on the Fantastic<\/em>, sparked by a sentence he had read in a book by Novalis: <\/p>\n

\n

If there were a theory of the fantastic such as there is in the case of logic, then we would be able to discover the art of invention.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Storytelling, Rodari realized, was a system for organizing thought into imagination, the way grammar is a system for organizing words into ideas. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Within a year, he had distilled what he presented at the workshop into a dazzling, deeply original book he titled The Grammar of Fantasy<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), only now available in English with enchanting illustrations by Matthew Forsythe<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Examining the structure of folk tales and the function of fairy tales, drawing on Tolstoy and Hegel, on the Brothers Grimm and Scientific American<\/em>, Rodari explores the inner workings of the imagination and its relationship to logic, the way it bridges the real and the ideal through fantasy, the way it makes our lives not only livable but worth living.<\/p>\n

Noting that he is making no \u201cattempt to establish a fully fledged \u2018theory of the fantastic,\u2019 with rules ready to be taught and studied in schools like geometry,\u201d that he is not seeking \u201ca complete theory of the imagination and invention,\u201d Rodari offers:<\/p>\n

\n

I hope that this small volume will prove useful to all those who believe it is necessary for the imagination to have a place in education, who have faith in the creativity of children, and who know the liberating value of the word. \u201cAll possible uses of words for all people\u201d \u2014 this seems to me a good motto, with a nice democratic sound. Not because everyone is an artist, but because no one is a slave.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Find my favorite parts of it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

IS A RIVER ALIVE?<\/h5>\n

<\/a>\u201cTime is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,\u201d Borges wrote in his timeless \u201crefutation\u201d of time<\/a>. \u201cNo one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,\u201d Nietzsche wrote a century earlier in his directive on how to find yourself<\/a>. But rivers are not just metaphors for life \u2014 they are its substance and sinew. They vein this rocky planet into a living world, a world whose mind is nerved and axoned with rivers. The planetary consciousness we call civilization bloomed on their banks and went on slaking its thirst for life with their waters in baptisms and funeral pyres, turbines and trade routes. Rivers were the lever by which the planetary thought process we call evolution lifted life itself out of the oceans to wing and paw and hoof the Earth, to forest it and flower it, to make it lush with minds and music.<\/p>\n

<\/a>
Art by Icinori from Thank You, Everything<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A river, then, may be considered a life form itself, its aliveness not a calculation of the life it shores up but a kind of moral calculus drawn from the rights and responsibilities that grant an entity the dignity of personhood. <\/p>\n

This view, readily reflected in many native traditions, is entirely absent from the Western canon, absent from our legislature and our imagination. It is what Robert Macfarlane<\/a> champions with passion and rigor in Is a River Alive?<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 a portal of a book, lucid and luminous, hinged on something particular and urgent (the rights of nature movement) but (because this is Robert Macfarlane) opening into the deepest recesses of the existential and the timeless: the measure and meaning of being alive. <\/p>\n

Extending an invitation to \u201cimagine water otherwise\u201d \u2014 and what is imagination itself if not the art of otherwise \u2014 he writes:<\/p>\n

\n

For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counter-intuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning. We might say that the fate of rivers under rationalism has been to become one-dimensional water.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

With an eye to Robin Wall Kimmerer\u2019s vivifying notion of a \u201cgrammar of animacy,\u201d he adds:<\/p>\n

\n

A good grammar of animacy can still re-enchant existence. To imagine that a river is alive causes water to glitter differently. New possibilities of encounter emerge \u2014 and loneliness retreats a step or two. You find yourself falling in love outward, to use Robinson Jeffers\u2019s beautiful phrase.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

RAISING HARE<\/h5>\n

<\/a>Narrow the aperture of your attention enough to take in any one thing fully, and it becomes a portal to everything. Anneal that attention enough so that you see whatever and whoever is before you free from expectation, unfiltered through your fantasies or needs, and it becomes love. Come to see anything or anyone this clearly \u2014 a falcon<\/a>, or a mountain<\/a>, or a patch of moss<\/a> \u2014 and you will find yourself loving the world more deeply.<\/p>\n

One winter day, walking through the placid English countryside while on pandemic-forced sabbatical from her roiling job as a foreign policy political advisor in London, Chloe Dalton stopped mid-stride at the sight of a small still creature haloed by the sunlight \u2014 a baby hare no bigger than her palm, right there in the middle of the path, about to change the course of her life, though she did not yet know it. In her moving memoir Raising Hare<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), she recounts that catalytic encounter:<\/p>\n

\n

The path I took was a short, unpaved track leading along the edge of a cornfield and emerging into a narrow country lane flanked with tall hedges overflowing with bramble and snowberry. The track, formed of two strips of hard-packed earth, was solid enough for a car to pass but pocked with potholes and puddles. I crested the skyline, deep in my thoughts, and began to walk down the slight slope towards the lane, when I was brought up short by a tiny creature facing me on the grass strip running down the track\u2019s centre. I stopped abruptly. Leveret<\/em>. The word surfaced in my mind, even though I had never seen a young hare before. <\/p>\n

The animal, no longer than the width of my palm, lay on its stomach with its eyes open and its short, silky ears held tightly against its back. Its fur was dark brown, thick and choppy, and grew in delicate curls along its spine. Long, pale guard hairs and whiskers stood out from its body and glowed in the weak sun, creating a corona of light around its rump and muzzle. Set against the bare earth and dry grass it was hard to tell where its fur ended and the ground began. It blended into the dead winter landscape so completely that, but for the rapid rise and fall of its flanks, I would have mistaken it for a stone. Its forepaws were pressed tightly together, fringed in fur the colour of bone and overlapping as if for comfort. Its jet-black eyes were encircled with a thick, uneven band of creamy fur. High on its forehead was a distinct white mark that stood out like a minute dribble of paint. It did not stir as I came into view, but studied the ground in front of it, unmoving. Leveret<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost Words<\/em><\/a> by Robert Macfarlane<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Unlike rabbits, so populous and docile that we have tamed them into pets and children\u2019s book characters, hares are rare and furtive to begin with \u2014 wild creatures glimpsed only out of the corner of the eye as they vanish into the thicket of their secret lives. Dalton had never seen a leveret before. She didn\u2019t know what to do \u2014 if she left it there, stranded and helpless as any newborn, it would be vulnerable to becoming prey or roadkill; if she touched it to move it into the tall grass, its mother, if alive at all, might not find it or might reject it, as wild animals are apt to do when the smell of their young has been tainted. <\/p>\n

One of life\u2019s great cruelties is that quick decisions we make at a certain hour on a certain day, decisions we could have and would have made otherwise on a different day in a different state of mind, end up shaping the years and decades ahead, shaping our very self. One of life\u2019s great mercies is that we never realize this at the crossing point of seemingly inconsequential choices \u2014 or else we would be paralyzed to take even the littlest step on the path of our becoming. <\/p>\n

Unable to reason her way out of the paradox, Dalton follows her own animal instinct and carefully swaddles the leveret in dry grass to avoid touching it, then tucks it into her coat, thinking she was taking it home for the night. She ends up raising it, and in a sense being raised by it toward her full humanity \u2014 shaken awake from the trance of workaholism, freed from the conditionings and compulsions we mistake for needs, resensitized to the wonder of life. She chronicles the experience \u2014 one rife with biological, ecological, and existential revelations \u2014 with the tenderness of Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s account of his three weeks cohabitating with a bunny<\/a>, the respectful observational rigor of Thoreau\u2019s overnight fosterage of a little owl<\/a>, and the searching intellect of Helen Macdonald\u2019s life with a goshawk<\/a>. Read some of it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

THE WANTING MONSTER<\/h5>\n

<\/a>Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness \u2014 to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough. \u201cEnough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,\u201d Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter<\/a> a century before Kurt Vonnegut, in his shortest and most poignant poem<\/a>, located the secret of happiness in the sense of enough. Wanting is a story of scarcity writing itself on the scroll of the mind, masquerading as an equation read from the blackboard of reality. That story is the history of the world. But it need not be its future, or yours. <\/p>\n

An epoch after John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan<\/em><\/a> \u2014 John Ciardi\u2019s magnificent 1963 spell against the cult of more \u2014 author Martine Murray and artist Anna Read, living parallel lives close to nature in rural Australia, offer a mighty new counter-myth in The Wanting Monster<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 an almost unbearably wonderful modern fable about who we would be and what this world would be like if we finally arrived, exhausted and relieved, at the still point of enough. Having always felt that great children\u2019s books are works of philosophy in disguise, speaking great truth in the language of tenderness, I hold this one among my all-time favorites. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The story begins in a town so tranquil and content that no one notices the Wanting Monster, who stands sulking on the edge of the scene, part ghost out of a Norse myth, part Sendakian Wild Thing. <\/p>\n

And so the Wanting Monster stomps over to the next village, \u201cbellowing and crashing about as monsters do,\u201d but still the magpie keeps singing, the bees keep laboring at the flowers, and the children keep playing in the square. The Wanting Monster redoubles the growling and the howling, but not even Billie Ray, \u201cthe littlest child of the village,\u201d pays heed. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This inflicts no small identity crisis:<\/p>\n

\n

What good was a monster if it couldn\u2019t raise any trouble? If it couldn\u2019t even raise the eyebrow of a small, curly-headed child? The Wanting Monster had its head in shame.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But then it comes upon Mr. Banks, napping serenely by the stream. With that \u201cterrible compulsion\u201d that turns the insecure monstrous, the Wanting Monster moans its siren growl of want into the sleeping man\u2019s ear.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Mr. Banks began to wriggle. His heart began to jiggle. <\/p>\n

A little note of misery sounded in his mind. <\/p>\n

What could possibly be wrong? <\/p>\n

It was a perfect day for a snooze by the stream. But now he wanted something else, something more.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read and see more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

ALPHA & OMEGA<\/h5>\n

<\/a>\u201cHave faith,\u201d someone I loved said to me, holding my face in her hands \u2014 the face of a lifelong atheist. And suddenly, there in the lacuna between love and reason, in the warmth between her palms, I found myself reckoning with the meaning of faith \u2014 this ancient need for something to keep us from breaking the possible on the curb of the known, to keep the heart from breaking on the cold hard floor of a world that has always mistaken the limits of the imagination for the limits of reality. And I thought of Jane Ellen Harrison<\/a> (September 9, 1850\u2013April 15, 1928) \u2014 the classicist who brought Ancient Greece to the modern world, who declared herself a \u201cdeeply religious atheist\u201d and devoted her life to excavating the roots of the religious impulse from the clay of the psyche, teaching us that it is not who or what we pray to but what we pray for that reveals and redeems our lives; that what we pray for, not on our knees but in our choices and the stories we tell about them, conjures up the world we yearn to live in and it is our yearning that we act upon to make the world. Every choice we make in our political and personal lives is a prayer. All change is prayerful action toward a different kind of world \u2014 an act of faith toward the future and an act of heresy toward the status quo. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Altarpiece<\/em> by Hilma af Klint, 1907. (Available as a print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cTo be a heretic today is almost a human obligation,\u201d Jane Ellen Harrison declared<\/a> from the peak of her thoroughly heretical life in one of the superb essays collected in Alpha & Omega<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>). She loved a woman a generation younger than her, loved a world millennia older than hers, loved ideas epochs ahead of her time. Virginia Woolf was taken by \u201cher superb high thinking agnostic ways.\u201d In the nascent evolutionary theory, which Harrison she insisted every thinking person should read, she saw a lens on the human soul and its constellation in societies, saw \u201chow the whole of animal life sets towards the making of the individual, and yet how the individual never is, never can be, complete,\u201d saw how science and spirituality both reach for that \u201cinvisible prepotent force on which and through which we can possibly act, with which we are in some way connected.\u201d She believed in the power of collective consciousness and equally in \u201cthe value of each individual manifestation of life,\u201d and above all in the merging of the two in \u201cthe strange new joy, and even ecstasy, that comes of human sympathy.\u201d <\/p>\n

She cherished the \u201cinward and abiding patience\u201d of science, its \u201cgentleness\u201d in understanding the true timescales of change, how long it takes to uproot an invasive untruth from the garden of culture. Religion she regarded as a \u201cnecessary step in the evolution of human thought,\u201d but she detested its dogmas \u2014 its \u201cnet of illusive clarity cast over life and its realities,\u201d the way its doctrines \u201cdistract attention from that divinity which is ourselves.\u201d She sought to understand the need for it: \u201cMan,\u201d she wrote when we were all men, \u201cfeels and acts, and out of his feeling and action, projected into his con\u00adfused thinking, he develops a god.\u201d Her god was not our maker but our making, not a pacifier for the lonely confusion of being a self but a clarifying force for the cosmos of connection between us and everything that is \u2014 that recognition of universal consciousness she believed not only is \u201cthe new religion for which the world wait\u201d but \u201calready is, if unconsciously, our religion.\u201d She insisted that in order to attain \u201creal freedom and full individual life, life based on sympathy and mutual interdependence,\u201d we must place this recognition at the center of our institutions. \u201cRepression, vengeance, disunion, are the keynotes of our old disastrous system,\u201d she warned in the first year of the world\u2019s first global war, urging us to take \u201ca step, and a big one, out of the prison of self.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because she recognized that faith is an adaptation of the self, she was especially fascinated by experiences of religious conversion, by all mystical experiences, fascinated by how they tend to come just after moments of profound personal crisis or heartbreak, when \u201csome shattering blow has been dealt to a man\u2019s personality, to his affection or ambition.\u201d Here was a cathartic unselfing, a submergence of the self into the oneness \u2014 in conversion, \u201cthe individual spirit is socialized.\u201d She saw science as another instrument of unselfing, the way \u201cit holds immediate personal re\u00adaction in suspense\u201d to reveal a larger reality \u2014 \u201cthe whole, the unbounded whole,\u201d to which religion is a reaction: In our inability to hold \u201cthe real mystery of the universe, the force behind things, before which we all bow,\u201d we create \u201cvarious and shifting\u201d eikon<\/em> \u2014 Greek for image, figure, or likeness, origin of the English icon<\/em>. This \u201cattempted expression of the unknown in terms of the known\u201d is our self-expatriation from the mystery we live with, the mystery we are.<\/p>\n

She drew on St. Paul and Darwin, on Whitman and Tagore, guarding religion from theology and defining it simply as \u201cthat commerce with the unseen and unknown\u201d that is the natural consequence of our imagination and our capacity for free thought. Theology, she thought, is a metastasis of our unease with the unknown, of our need to create a referent for it in the known \u2014 something to make us feel \u201crelieved, comforted, reassured, at home\u201d \u2014 and bow to it, calling it God. But such gods, she cautioned, are \u201ca moving away from religion . . . a rationalizing into the known, not a relation of faith to the unknown.\u201d It was faith she was interested in \u2014 the psychology of it, the source of it, the different meanings and manifestations of it to different people at different times across different cultures. The questions at the heart of faith \u2014 what we believe in, what we pray for, how we ritualize our beliefs in opinions and actions \u2014 became her lens for understanding nearly every aspect of human culture and society.<\/p>\n

But although she lamented living through an \u201canti-rational age\u201d in which reason seemed to have \u201csuffered a certain eclipse,\u201d Jane Ellen Harrison never ceased believing that love is superior to reason, further along the evolutionary axis of human development. Pulsating beneath all of her writing is the quiet, unfaltering conviction that change is the work of time and love, that religion and politics are just symptoms of the ferment that roils deep inside the philosophical and poetic superstructure of human life, that time is the richest subject of philosophy, that the poet\u2019s job is to love people and show them \u201cthe bigness, the beauty, of their lives,\u201d that science should resist the push toward specialization and break down the artificial boundaries between disciplines that keep us from seeing the full picture of reality. Out of her life and her work, out of her politics and her passions, arises her simple animating ethos: \u201cBy contacts we are saved.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, having made a life in scholarship, she returned over and over to love \u2014 the supreme unselfing, the great cathedral of the mystery to which all science and all religion are an incomplete response, the light looking out from the face between the palms that we may call faith. \u201cLearning severs us from all but a few \u2014 love re\u00adunites us,\u201d she wrote. \u201cSuch is the mystery of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The day after Jane Ellen Harrison died at age seventy-seven \u2014 an unseasonable spring day of \u201cbitter windy rain\u201d \u2014 Virginia Woolf took a break from working on Orlando<\/em> \u2014 her four-century love letter to Vita Sackville-West<\/a>, the great love of her own life \u2014 and went for a walk in the cemetery, where she ran into the poet and novelist Hope Mirrlees, Jane\u2019s partner, \u201cthe colour of dirty brown paper,\u201d distraught and \u201chalf sleep\u201d with grief. <\/p>\n

\"\"
Hope Mirrlees and Jane Ellen Harrison<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Virginia recounted her encounter with the broken Hope:<\/p>\n

\n

We kissed by Cromwell\u2019s daughter\u2019s grave, where Shelley used to walk, for Jane\u2019s death. She lay dead outside the graveyard in that back room where we saw her lately raised on her pillows, like a very old person, whom life has tossed up, & left; exalted, satisfied, exhausted.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Virginia got to the funeral just as the service was ending. The clergyman was reading \u201csome of the lovelier, more rational parts of the Bible,\u201d but she felt unmoved. <\/p>\n

\n

As usual, the obstacle of not believing dulled & bothered me. Who is \u2018God\u2019 & what the Grace of Christ? & what did they mean to Jane?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Outside, \u201ca bird sang most opportunely; with a gay indifference, & if one liked, hope, that Jane would have enjoyed.\u201d <\/p>\n

Later, Hope later received a note of condolence from Virginia, containing a single line. \u201cIt was more comforting than all my other letters put together,\u201d she told a friend half a lifetime later. It read:<\/p>\n

\n

But remember what you have had.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

OLIVER SACKS: LETTERS<\/h5>\n

<\/a>\u201cI have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure,\u201d the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks<\/a> (July 9, 1933\u2013August 30, 2015) wrote in the wake of his terminal diagnosis as he contemplated what makes life worth living<\/a>, having devoted his own life of visionary lunacy<\/a> to shedding light on what makes a person, how we find ourselves and lose ourselves in the convoluted corridors of the mind.<\/p>\n

His singular spirit, the quiet passion of his devotion to the human project, and his uncommon insight into the life of the mind come alive in his posthumously published Letters<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), revealing in a new way \u2014 in that singular way that only the contact point between one consciousness and another can reveal \u2014 his views on the self, the creative process, music, the relationship between art and science, the nature of love, and much more. <\/p>\n

Read some of my favorite fragments of the book \u2014 Oliver\u2019s dazzling love letters to his Hungarian lover \u2014 here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

LOVE LETTER TO A GARDEN<\/h5>\n

<\/a>You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed<\/a>, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hungers for the sun, you are resisting the dying of the light<\/a> and saying \u201cyes\u201d to life. <\/p>\n

Gardening may or may not make you a great writer<\/a>, but it will lavish you with metaphors, those fulcrums of meaning without which all writing \u2014 all thinking \u2014 would be merely catalog copy for a still life. <\/p>\n

You may or may not be able to stop a war by planting a garden<\/a>, but each time you kneel to press a seed into the ground and bow to look at the ants kissing a peony abloom, you are calling ceasefire on the war within; you are learning to tend to fragility, to cultivate a quiet stubborn resilience, to surrender to forces larger than your will; you are learning to trust time, which is our best means of trusting life. \u201cThe gardener,\u201d Derek Jarman wrote in his profound journal of gardening his way through grief<\/a>, \u201cdigs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end\u2026 the Amen beyond the prayer.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is why Debbie Millman (yes<\/a>) begins her tenderly illustrated Love Letter to a Garden<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) at the very beginning, at that first atom of time chipped from the rib of eternity \u2014 the singularity<\/a> that seeded everything.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A seed, she observes, is a kind of singularity \u2014 a tiny beginning compacting an entire existence. And so, in consonance with the great naturalist John Muir\u2019s observation that \u201cwhen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,\u201d<\/a> it becomes impossible to contemplate this one thing without contemplating the nature and meaning of existence itself.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Read and see more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

BREAD OF ANGELS<\/h5>\n

<\/a>Every visionary, every person of greatness and originality, is a resounding yes to life \u2014 to the truth of their own experience, to the demanding restlessness of the creative spirit, to the beauty and brutality and sheer bewilderment of being alive \u2014 a yes made of unfaltering nos: no to the way things are commonly done, no to the standard models of what is possible and permissible for a person, no to the banality of approval, no to every Faustian bargain of so-called success offering prestige at the price of authenticity. <\/p>\n

One night after a long day shift as a waitress, a young mother tucked her sickly daughter into bed and handed her one of the few precious remnants of her own childhood \u2014 a 19th-century book of illustrated poems for boys and girls titled Silver Pennies<\/em>. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Winifred Bromhall from Silver Pennies<\/em> by Blanche Jennings Thompson, 1887. (Available as a print<\/a>, benefitting The New York Public Library.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Just as The Fairy Tale Tree<\/em><\/a> awakened the young Nick Cave to art, this was Patti Smith\u2019s precocious awakening as an artist. The opening sentence enchanted her: <\/p>\n

\n

You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland. But silver pennies are hard to find.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It seemed like a clear instruction, the price of what she yearned for: \u201centrance into the mystical world.\u201d In that way children have of touching the elemental truth of things, she intuited the two things needed for entry: \u201cthe heart to pierce other dimensions, the eyes to observe without judgment.\u201d <\/p>\n

She couldn\u2019t have known it then, but this may be the purest definition of what it takes to be an artist; she couldn\u2019t have known that she would spend the rest of her life not finding silver pennies but making them \u2014 for others to find, for her own salvation, for paying the price of her nos in living the enchanted yes of being an artist. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art by Winifred Bromhall from Silver Pennies<\/em> by Blanche Jennings Thompson, 1887. (Available as a print<\/a>, benefitting The New York Public Library.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In her moving memoir Bread of Angels<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>), she traces the trajectory of a life stubbornly defiant of the odds \u2014 the odds of bodily survival, with a \u201cProustian childhood\u201d punctuated by tuberculosis, scarlet fever, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and the A\/H2N2 virus; the odds of success: born into a poor family, her father, unable to afford a car, walking two miles to take the bus for his night shift; the odds of spiritual survival, with losses so harrowing to read about it is hard to imagine living with, from the death of her childhood best friend at twelve to a season of being marked by an incomprehensible cascade of losses: her artistic soul mate<\/a> is taken by AIDS, her husband falls ill and dies at the hospital where their children were born, and in the wake of all that grief her beloved brother is slain by a stroke while wrapping a Christmas present for his daughter. What saves her again and again is her reverence for the magic and mystery of life. Pulsating beneath it all is \u201clove, the ineffable miracle\u201d \u2014 that delicate art of holding on and letting go,<\/a> our training ground for trusting time.<\/p>\n

Read more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME<\/h5>\n

<\/a>Evolution invented REM sleep<\/a>, that ministry of dreams, to give us a safe way of practicing the possible into the real. The dreams of the night clarify our lives. The dreams of the day complicate them, charge them with the battery of fear and desire, quiver them with the urgency of our mortality and the fervor of our lust for life. To dream is to dare traversing the roiling ocean between what is and what could be on a ramshackle raft of determination and luck. The price we pay for dreaming is the possibility of drowning; the price we pay for not dreaming is the surety of coasting through life in a stupor of autopilot, landlocked in the givens of our time, place, and culture. The dreamer, then, is the only one fully awake to life \u2014 that bright technology of the possible the universe invented to prevail over the probable amid the cold austerity of eternal night. <\/p>\n

But what may be even harder than getting what you dream of is knowing what to dream of, annealing your imagination and your desires enough to trust that your dreams are your own \u2014 not the second-hand dreams of your parents, not your heroes\u2019 costumes of achievement, not your culture\u2019s templates of success. \u201cNo one can acquire for another \u2014 not one,\u201d Walt Whitman reckoned with how to own your life<\/a>, \u201cnot one can grow for another \u2014 not one,\u201d while two hundred miles north Thoreau was reckoning with the nature of success<\/a>, concluding: \u201cIf the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal \u2014 that is your success.\u201d<\/p>\n

They are nothing less than patron saints of the human spirit, those who protect our dreams from the false gods of success. Arundhati Roy<\/strong> is one such modern patron saint, and she takes up the complicated question of success in her exquisite memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 what success means and looks like in the deepest sense, how its shallow metrics can turn a person into \u201ca cold silver figurine with a cold silver heart,\u201d why \u201cmaking friends with defeat\u201d is \u201cthe very opposite of accepting it\u201d and so-called failure might actually be worth striving for. Along the way, and inevitably \u2014 because \u201csuccess\u201d is simply what we call the airbrushing of our yearning for self-actualization, for happiness, for living into and up to our gifts \u2014 she explores the interlaced complexities of family, culture, creativity, love, and forgiveness. <\/p>\n

ALPHABET IN MOTION<\/h5>\n

<\/a>It is astonishing enough that we invented language, this vessel of thought that shapes what it contains, that we lifted it to our lips to sip the world and tell each other what we taste, what it is like to be alive in this particular sensorium. But then we passed it from our lips to our hands and gave it form so we can hear it with our eyes and see with our minds, making shapes for sounds<\/a> and meaning from the shapes. <\/p>\n

We take it for granted now, this makeshift miracle permeating every substrate of our lives, and go on tasking these tiny concrete things with conveying our most immense and abstract ideas. We forget how young this technology of thought is, younger than Earth\u2019s largest living organism<\/a>, and yet it tells a richer story of who we are than any archeological artifact, touches more of what makes us human than the fossil record. Our letters carry the history of our species and of our world, their shapes shaped by a conversation between the creativity of our imagination and the constraints of our creaturely reality, from the rotational geometry of the human wrist to the chemistry of the first paints into which the first brushes were dipped. <\/p>\n

Kelli Anderson<\/a>, maker of material magic<\/a>, brings that layered history to life in Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape<\/em><\/strong><\/a> \u2014 a large-format two-volume marvel, many years and myriad prototypes in the making, full of paper pulleys and accordion delights that illustrate the biography of each letter. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

Through a kaleidoscope of disciplines, from art and design to anthropology and history, Kelli shines a dazzling light on how we went from ink to lead to pixel, drawing on everything from Plato\u2019s Cratylus<\/em> to an 1882 textbook on the workings of the Jacquard loom to (which sparked the concept of the first computer code<\/a> in the fertile mind of the the young Ada Lovelace) to the punch card revolution and its hidden history of women working under pseudonyms to conjure up the digital universe. <\/p>\n

Read and see more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

AFLAME<\/h5>\n

<\/a>The best measure of serenity may be our distance from the self \u2014 getting far enough to dim the glare of ego and quiet the din of the mind, with all its ruminations and antagonisms, in order to see the world more clearly, in order to hear more clearly our own inner voice, the voice that only ever speak of love. <\/p>\n

It is difficult to achieve this in society, where the wanting monster<\/a> is always roaring and the tyranny of should<\/em> reigns supreme. <\/p>\n

We need silence<\/a>. <\/p>\n

We need solitude<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The great paradox of our time is that the more they seem like a luxury in a world of war and want, the more of a necessity they become to the survival of our souls. <\/p>\n

Pico Iyer<\/a>, that untiring steward of the human soul, liberates the possibility imprisoned in the paradox with his slender and splendid book Aflame: Learning from Silence<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 a reckoning with the meaning of life drawn from his time spent in a Benedictine monastery on a journey toward inner stillness and silence, along which his path crosses those of those of fellow travelers in search of unselfing: a 100-year-old Japanese monk and a young Peruvian woman with a love of Wittgenstein (who worked as a gardener in a monastery himself), the Dalai Lama and Leonard Cohen, a middle-aged corporate refugee \u201cred-cheeked and glowing with life\u201d and a white-haired French-Canadian widow with a spirit that \u201ckeeps shining, like a candle in the fog.\u201d<\/p>\n

He paints the portal through which he enters what is both an enchantment and an annealing of reality:<\/p>\n

\n

The road looks milky in the moonlight. The globe feels rounded as I\u2019ve never seen it elsewhere. Stars stream down as if shaken from a tumbler. Somewhere, a dog is barking. Taillights disappear around the turns twelve miles to the south. Strange, how rich it feels to be cleansed of all chatter. That argument I was conducting with myself on the drive up, that deadline next week, the worries about my sweetheart in Japan: gone, all gone. It\u2019s not a feeling but a knowing; in the emptiness I can be filled by everything around me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach<\/em>, 1931 \u2014 one of Hasui Kawase\u2019s stunning vintage Japanese woodblocks<\/a>. (Available as a print<\/a>.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To contact that emptiness is to realize that we spend our lives trying to find ourselves, only to discover that the self is precisely what stands between us and being fully alive, what severs our consanguinity with star and stone, with mycelium and mourning dove. This is why an \u201coccasion for unselfing,\u201d<\/a> in Iris Murdoch\u2019s lovely term, is no small gift \u2014 one only ever conferred upon us not by seeking and striving but, in Jeanette Winterson\u2019s lovely term, \u201cactive surrender.\u201d<\/a> We may come to it (in art, in music, in nature), or it may come to us (in cataclysm, in love, in death). Iyer comes to it in the silence of the monastery \u2014 which is \u201cnot like that of a deep forest or mountaintop\u201d but \u201cactive and thrumming, almost palpable\u201d \u2014 and it comes to him redoubled:<\/p>\n

\n

Why am I exultant to find myself in the silence of this Catholic monastery? Maybe because there\u2019s no \u201cI\u201d to get in the way of the exultancy. Only the brightness of the blue above and below. That red-tailed hawk circling, the bees busy in the lavender. It\u2019s as if a lens cap has come off and once the self is gone, the world can come flooding in, in all its wild immediacy.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Such a simple revolution: Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

THE BOOK OF ALCHEMY<\/h5>\n

<\/a>I know of no better medicine for the spirit than a daily<\/a> creative<\/a> practice<\/a>, and I know of no better field guide to embarking on one and sticking with it, no better floatation device for the ocean of self-doubt that regularly engulfs all creative work, than The Book of Alchemy<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) by Suleika Jaouad, whose very life is a testament to art as the alchemy of suffering into strength, into connection, into meaning. <\/p>\n

Pulsating beneath this gentle guided tour of your own creative potential is the assurance that fear is a signpost toward the right direction, consonant with David Bowie\u2019s advice<\/a> to \u201cgo a little bit out of your depth, and when you don\u2019t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you\u2019re just about in the right place to do something exciting.\u201d Suleika writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Trust and find ways to delight in the mystery of how things unfold, even if it\u2019s not what you had planned, even if it\u2019s far from ideal, and to believe that facing the thing you fear brings you exactly what you need.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the center of it all is the creative power of keeping a journal, to which some of humanity\u2019s most beloved artists and writers have attested<\/a>: Virginia Woolf did it \u201cto loosen the ligaments\u201d of her formal writing; Ana\u00efs Nin did it \u201cto capture the living moments\u201d; Thoreau did it to know how \u201cthe imaginary hero\u201d of his own life \u201clived day to day\u201d; Susan Sontag did it as a way of feeling \u201cemotionally and spiritually independent.\u201d Drawing in her own experience of extended illness, on that terrible loneliness of standing perched on the precipice of life while everyone else goes on living, Suleika reflects on how \u201cjournaling allows you to alchemize isolation into creative solitude\u201d and writes:<\/p>\n

\n

If you\u2019re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Journaling as a process is utterly alchemizing, with practical applications in every area of one\u2019s life and work. The journal is like a chrysalis: the container of your goopiest, most unformed self. It\u2019s a rare space, in this age of hypercurated personas, where you can share your most unedited thoughts, where you can sort through the raw material of your life. Day by day, page by page, you uncover the answers that are already inside of you, and you begin to transform. And yet, at the same time that it offers transcendence, there\u2019s nothing more humble than the journal.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the remainder of The Book of Alchemy<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, she invites a dazzling spectrum of minds \u2014 poets, philosophers, novelists, artists, comedians, entrepreneurs, musicians, and various other revolutionaries of the commonplace \u2014 to each share a creative prompt, ranging from a blessing<\/a> to a letter to George Saunders\u2019s magnificent four-stage action\/reaction prompt \u201cdesigned to disrupt your idea of who you are, and give you, perhaps, a slightly more generous vision of your capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

(AND ONE FROM ME)<\/h5>\n

<\/a>On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported<\/a> that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon with just the right shape to be shaded just the right amount to offer shelter from the extremes of the lunar surface. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to act as its thermostat, its temperature fluctuates dramatically as it faces and turns away from the Sun, rising to 260\u00b0F (about 127\u00b0C) in the daytime and plummeting to -280\u00b0F (about -173\u00b0C) at night. But these unique nooks, which are most likely collapsed lava tubes, are a cozy 63\u00b0F (17\u00b0C) inside \u2014 the feeling-tone of a crisp autumn day in Brooklyn, where I live. Images from the LRO suggested that these pits might unfold into caves that would make perfect sites for lunar exploration \u2014 campsites with a stable temperature, more protected from cosmic rays, solar radiation, and micrometeorites. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There is something poetic in knowing that we evolved in caves and might one day inhabit caves on another celestial body, having invented the means to get there with the imagination that bloomed over millions of years in the lonely bone cave of the mind.<\/p>\n

There is also something poetic in knowing that as we fantasize about leaving for the Moon, the Moon is leaving us.<\/p>\n

The prolific English astronomer Edmund Halley first began suspecting this disquieting fact in the early 18th century after analyzing ancient eclipse records. Nobody believed him \u2014 the Moon looked so steady, so unlosable. It took a quarter millennium for his theory to be vindicated: When Apollo<\/em> astronauts placed mirrors on the lunar surface and when laser beams were beamed at them from Earth, it was revealed that the Moon is indeed drifting away from us, at the precise rate of 3.8 centimeters per year \u2014 more than half the rate at which a child grows.<\/p>\n

The Moon is leaving us because of the gravitational conversation between it and the Earth: the ocean tides. The drag they cause slows down the planet\u2019s spin rate. Because gravity binds the Moon and the Earth, as the Earth loses angular momentum, the Moon overcompensates in response; as it speeds up, it begins slipping out of our gravitational grip, slowly moving away from us.<\/p>\n

We know this thanks to Albert Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity \u2014 the revelation that space is not flat, time is not absolute, and spacetime is a single fabric along the curvature of which everything, including light, moves.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

I thought of Einstein, who at sixteen, lonely and introverted, began wondering about the nature of the universe by imagining himself chasing a beam of light through outer space; I thought of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, also lonely and also dedicated to the light, who at the same time was formulating his general theory of love as \u201ctwo solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.\u201d<\/a> And I thought about how love is simply the solitary light between people, neither partitioned nor merged but shared, to light up the sliver of spacetime we have each been allotted before returning our borrowed stardust to the universe.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Somehow it all felt like a children\u2019s book that didn\u2019t yet exist. So I wrote The Coziest Place on the Moon<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 a modern fable about how to live with loneliness and what it means to love, illustrated by the wildly talented Sarah Jacoby<\/a>. Peek inside here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
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Because I read for the same reason I write \u2014 to fathom my life and deepen my living \u2014 looking back on a year of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}