94. Learn To Labour And To Wait 🚏
Did a special friend forward you this email and now you’d like your own?
Here, let me help you with that:
Friends,
It’s the weekend.
Here’s five things you may find interesting and/or meaningful.
1. Reading 📘
I wrote about why I loved this book on empowered women here, but if you know me irl you’d already know why:
2. A Poem 🚏
A Psalm Of Life — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
3. Watching 👟👟
Louis, 8-and-a-half years old, is autistic. He arrives at his new school and is about to introduce himself.
4. Women in Art 🎨
“A woman with dark hair and matching wing-like eyebrows lounges on a bed amid clashing fabrics. She’s casually propped up against a squashy pillow and her ankles are crossed. The pose is associated with Renaissance nudes, but here it’s subverted – not least because our model is clothed, in a pink camisole and baggy green-and-white striped trousers. She looks away, pensive, with a cigarette between her lips and a couple of books at her feet. She has broad shoulders and strong arms and legs, and her skin is a blotchy pink. Far from an idealised nude laid out for a male viewer, she’s a liberated modern woman who smokes, reads and, most importantly, isn’t always sexually available.”
Loving this article about the life and love of French artist Suzanne Valadon.
5. Loving 🔥
These mid-century modern matchboxes from Eastern Bloc countries.
See you next Sunday.