Last night, I read my 30th book this year, not that I’m prioritizing numbers, but simply because I’m spending more time at it, reading a minimal fifty pages daily, and not just any book, but some of the best ever written, conglomeration of genres that have shaped my world, defined who I am, not the quixotic schoolboy of sixteen, rebellious, often angry, in pursuit of discovering who I was and, better, who I wanted to be, that best self, enlarged through awareness and sensitivity.
Today, a new book: Philip Hoare’s William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: Art, Poetry and the Imaging of a New World (2025), his moving tribute to the great poet and his myriad influence. I first read Blake as a university English major and he’s stayed with me as one of my favorite poets.
Blake taught me to see life as polarity, the mix of opposites, of their necessity to wholeness, like summer and winter, the sun by day, the moon by night, beginning and ending, “the marriage of heaven and hell” as he called their fusion, innuendos of Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness: make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (KJV).
Thus began my odyssey with myth, paradox its hub, my later love for Keats and his “negative capability,” of opposites unresolved, my passage into Blake”s protégés, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Butler Yeats, Paul Nash, Iris Murdoch, counter culture artists Allen Ginsberg, Dave Bowie, and Bob Dylan.
Ahead of his time, Blake opposed slavery, championed social reform in poems like the “Little Black Boy”:
“…we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love, And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.
For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice. Saying: come out from the grove my love & care, And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.
Thus did my mother say and kissed me, And thus I say to little English boy. When I from black and he from white cloud free, And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:
Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear, To lean in joy upon our fathers knee. And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him and he will then love me.”
I have cherished his profundity veiled in simplicity, his magnificent “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour” (”Auguries of Innocence”):
I continue to rejoice in “Jerusalem,” England’s unofficial anthem, with its call to battle injustice:
“I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land.”
Arrested for sedition, Blake was not a nationalist, but a champion of the ideals of the French Revolution. Not only opposing slavery, he was anti-monarchy and anti-Church of England, elitists out-of-touch with the laboring class.
My early reverence for Blake led me to seek out his grave in the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground of the London Borough of Islington, an unmarked grave he shared with others—meanwhile, the din of urban traffic that could not muffle an inner quietude of somber reverence.
Blake has been with me in all of life’s flux, an inspiration, a friend.
Reading has granted me converse with the best that’s been thought and said, new landscapes, new friendships, companions I have with me always, in the days and in the nights.
It’s a funny thing how I sometimes reach back into my childhood for memories that yield comfort in older years, simple truths endowed with a wisdom that sustains.
I loved Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories, smartly drawn from her keen observation of England’s rural landscape, reinforcing my deep affection for my fellow creatures. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter have been my buddies all the days of my life.
Along with them came the wild, staccato rhythms of Dr. Seuss and every volume of the Doctor Dolittle series.
Maybe I’m just waxing sentimental—I’ve always been a deeply feeling person—but in surfacing these forgotten memories, I feel reborn.
Here are several gems I indulged in just this morning, each granting its own quiet contentment. First, the anonymous lines of the children’s poem traditionally titled “The Polite Rabbit”:
I met a grey rabbit, at the top of the hill. We both stopped to look, and stood very still. But I didn’t scare him, and he didn’t scare me, Because I was polite, and so was he.
Christina Rossetti captured a similar quiet kinship in “The Caterpillar,” tracking its transformation from humble crawler to exquisite butterfly, a reminder of how what seems simple can, given allowance, mature into unexpected beauty:
Brown and furry Caterpillar in a hurry, Take your walk To the shady leaf, or stalk, Or what not, Which may be the chosen spot. No toad spy you, Hovering bird of prey pass by you; Spin and die, To live again a butterfly.
The capstone for me since my youth has always been William Wordsworth’s celebratory poem of nature’s beauty, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”—that supreme exemplar of poetry rendered in simple language, of “emotion recollected in tranquility”:
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
I have since read every one of his several hundred poems—some better than others, but always granting solace.
Fortunately, great verse is still being written to guide our children and grandchildren on their life journeys. Take, for example, this marvelous stanza by Jeanne Willis, from her illustrated picture book, WildChild (2012):
They caught all the wild children, and put them in zoos, They made them do sums and wear sensible shoes. They put them to bed at the wrong time of day, And made them sit still when they wanted to play. They scrubbed them with soap and they made them eat peas. They made them behave and say pardon and please. They took all their wisdom and wildness away. That’s why there are none in the forests today.
Talk about rearing conformist children, alienated from nature, taught never to draw outside the lines, never to rebel and find their true selves—wow!
Call it nostalgia if you like, but William Wordsworth got it right when he wrote in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” that “The Child is father of the Man.”
By that, he meant that childhood’s gift of innocence and wonder amid nature’s plentiful grace helps define the adults we ultimately become.
I believe, like Wordsworth, that the child lingers within us. Recovering that child within, its capacity for wonder, to notice a rabbit on a hill, a caterpillar on a leaf, a field of daffodils dancing in the wind—these are not childish things to be outgrown.
I hadn’t heard of Denis Johnson (1949–2017) until I read an Esquire article enthusiastically recommending Netflix’s 2025 film Train Dreams, an adaptation of Johnson’s 2011 novella of the same title.
I liked what I read—the story of a shy man, Robert Grainier, who finds words difficult. He arrives as an orphaned child in Idaho’s rugged panhandle at the advent of the twentieth century. A day laborer, he joins crews cutting giant timber and building massive railroad trestles; later, he founds his own venture, hauling freight across the Idaho wilderness by horse-drawn wagon. He falls in love. They have a child and build a cabin in the woods. Joy and grief follow.
The story transcends Grainier, who lives into old age as a witness to a vanished America we will not see again—a sweep of history moving from horses to railroads, cars, electricity, telephones, television, aviation and rockets into space.
I watched the film and read the novella, whose 117 pages go quickly. Directed by Clint Bentley and co-written with Greg Kwedar, the film stars Joel Edgerton as Grainier and richly deserves its critical acclaim, with several reviewers calling it one of the most moving cinematic works of the new century.
Nominated for four Oscars, the film fleshes out the book’s narrative. Page and screen offer apples and oranges, distinct yet equally absorbent and moving tellings, each capturing the life of a simple, everyday man carrying his grief with quiet dignity, portraying life’s randomness and impermanence through rhythmic sequences and soft-lit photography.
The book itself leaves no word wasted, flashing with lyrical intensity. Wolves howl. Sentry spruces keep watch, piercing solemn, low-wandering cumulus flotsam. Short sentences mirror time’s passage, moving like water slipping over smooth stones. The book ends, leaving behind a haunting lingering. Not surprisingly, critics have dubbed it an epic masterpiece rendered in brevity.
Johnson began as a poet and went on to write short stories, nine novels, a novella, and two plays. Train Dreams won an O. Henry Award, one of the top honors for American and Canadian short fiction, and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Earlier, his Vietnam War novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), won the National Book Award.
I now think of him as one of our contemporary best, agreeing with the critics ranking him alongside Cormac McCarthy in chronicling the American experiment, though doing it more gently, measuring what was gained against so much irretrievably lost.
I’ve just finished reading the proposed Texas State Board of Education reading list.
In fairness, it contains a number of worthwhile works that introduce students to foundational texts in American history and culture. Yet it is also unmistakably the product of a Republican-controlled State Board of Education, reflecting a distinctly conservative vision of what students should read.
Biblical passages appear at nearly every grade level, Nothing comparable is drawn from Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or other religious traditions, despite the growing religious diversity of Texas classrooms.
Its political leanings are equally unmistakable. High school students encounter Margaret Thatcher’s “Eulogy for President Reagan,” Ayn Rand’s “What Is Capitalism?” (from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal), and Thomas Sowell’s “Flattering Unction” (from The Vision of the Anointed).
Missing are serious countervailing perspectives that might encourage students to weigh competing ideas rather than inherit a single ideological framework.
Although students read excerpts from Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” major literary voices are conspicuously absent. Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Sandra Cisneros. Prominent Asian-American writers are nowhere to be found.
Mark Twain is absent as well, conveniently avoiding the controversies surrounding Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has likewise disappeared.
The proposed list, scheduled to take effect in 2030 if approved, has already been reduced from roughly 300 works to 200. Among those removed were The GreatGatsby, The Alchemist, The Hate U Give, and To Kill a Mockingbird.
Even more striking is the absence of books published during the past half century. Lois Lowry’s The Giver, a riveting dystopian novel introducing middle-school readers to questions of memory, conformity, and moral choice—is missing.
So is Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a coming-of-age novel confronting trauma, mental illness, and adolescence.
Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, one of the defining memoirs of twentieth-century America, is absent as well.
What remains is a reading list whose omissions reveal its priorities as clearly as its selections. This is less an exercise in literary judgment than an attempt to shape civic identity through selective reading.
The response has been swift. PEN America, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the American Federation of Teachers have all criticized the proposal.
While many states publish recommended reading lists, Texas’s carries unusual weight in defining what students are expected to encounter and, just as importantly, what they are not.
In the end, this is censorship by omission.
At a moment when reading proficiency is declining and many young people struggle to finish even a single book, schools should be placing in students’ hands works that ignite curiosity rather than merely satisfy ideological objectives.
Jason Reynolds’s Long Way Down, for example, can be read in a single evening. A fifteen-year-old boy enters an elevator intent on avenging his brother’s murder; at every floor another ghost steps inside. The novel is impossible to put down, yet its real power lies in the moral questions that linger long after the final page.
The same can be said of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, the extraordinary true story of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, whose survival of a plane crash, weeks adrift at sea, and years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, becomes ultimately a story not simply of endurance, but of forgiveness.
A good book invites a conversation with its author. It excites. It unsettles. It enlarges the imagination.
Reading lists are, by necessity, adult constructions. But Alan Jacobs, in ThePleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction” (2011), reminds us that the deepest reading often begins elsewhere, not with official lists, but with curiosity.
The books that stay with us are frequently those discovered by chance, books that cultivate sustained attention amid the constant distractions of modern life.
When Christopher Nolan decided to film TheOdyssey, he had no shortage of distinguished English translations from which to choose. From among them, he chose Emily Wilson’s, remarkable for its freshness, clarity, and contemporary English while remaining faithful to Homer’s poetry.
Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has also translated TheIliad. Unlike some modern “translators,” whose work consists largely of revising earlier English versions, Wilson translates directly from the ancient Greek text. She is equally at home in Latin, a reminder of the extraordinary linguistic preparation classical scholarship once demanded.
That accomplishment is no small feat. Were Homeric Greek taught as a modern foreign language, its highly inflected grammar would make it among the most demanding languages to master, up there with Chinese, Arabic, and Russian.
Wilson also reads classical Greek fluently, the evolved language of Plato, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Aristotle with its unique vocabulary and grammar.
My own acquaintance with the classical languages began in high school, where I studied Latin for two years. The curriculum offered four years, but I opted instead for French and German. Today, my old high school no longer teaches those languages, having replaced them with Spanish.
A few years later, I enrolled in an intensive eight-week Harvard summer course in Koine Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean during the Roman Empire and language of the New Testament. Easier than Homeric or classical Greek, it nevertheless presents formidable challenges.
Our Australian instructor insisted that we learn Greek actively rather than merely decipher it. Instead of translating Greek into English, we were expected to orally translate English into Greek. With only ten students in the room, we couldn’t evade being called upon repeatedly to think, speak, and stumble in the language in real-time. That meant knowing where the accents fell for each word, often very arbitrary, unlike Spanish and Italian.
It was a demanding approach, but by the end of the course I could work through New Testament passages with little more than the aid of a dictionary. Most of that Greek has long since vanished, although I can still read the alphabet, which proved unexpectedly useful years later when I studied Russian, whose Cyrillic alphabet derives in part from Greek.
Impressed with my teacher, I asked him how long he had studied the classical languages. His answer has remained with me ever since: “Thirteen years of Latin; eleven years of Greek.” I was in good hands.
I’ve often regretted not keeping up with Greek, a language renowned for precision in contrast to English, whose richness often lies in words layered with multiple shades of meaning, wonderful for poetry, but often less exact. Reading Greek reveals layers of irony, structural symmetry, and philosophical nuance that disappear in translation.
Growing up in Massachusetts, one could spend a Saturday “junking” through secondhand bookstores and antique shops, coming away with Latin and Greek grammars for a dime apiece, evidence of the former preeminence of classical languages in the curriculum of schools such as Boston Latin School.
Long before my own time, that same New England landscape was shaped by minds saturated in the classics. Ralph Waldo Emerson read Plato in the original Greek, finding in those ancient dialogues the architecture for his own transcendental philosophy. His friend Henry David Thoreau famously carried his Greek text of TheIliad with him to Walden Pond, writing in Walden that true literature must be read in the language in which it was written—the ancient letters “carved out of the breath of life itself.”
Much of that world has faded. Outside a handful of elite institutions like Deerfield Academy, Groton, Phillips Exeter, or in schools like England’s Eton, the sustained study of Latin and Greek has become increasingly rare. Wilson herself began studying both languages at Oxford High School, an independent all-girls school in Oxford before reading Classics (“Greats”) at Balliol College, Oxford, and earning her doctorate at Yale.
I sometimes imagine what it would have been like had I continued with Greek throughout my life: to read Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Homer in their own words, perhapsallowing my synapses to mount a quiet resistance to incipient forgetfulness.
I think, too, of modern writers like J.K. Rowling and Toni Morrison, whose formal classical training echoes structurally throughout their work. And yet, the figure who haunts me most is one who had to build her own door to the ancient world: Virginia Woolf.
Denied the university education her brothers received, simply because she was a woman, she taught herself Greek and continued reading it throughout her life. For Woolf, Greek was not an academic ornament, but a living intellectual companion shaping her prose, her essays, and her understanding of literature.
Each year I return to her magnificent essay, “On Not Knowing Greek” (1925), invariably lingering on her summarizing sentence:
“It is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, the confusion, the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age.”
Thus far, my plan to read 50–60 books a year, based on a new approach to how and what I read, has become one of the most fufilling disciplines of my life. I’ve just completed Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, an award-winning biography based on newly discovered manuscripts that shatter long-held fallacies regarding Gauguin. It’s my twenty-third book this year, with six months still to go.
It’s not numbers per se that interest me, but the cultivation of reading as a daily habit, as natural as brushing one’s teeth. I was inspired by James Clear’s AtomicHabits, which demonstrates how small, repeated behaviors, faithfully practiced, become almost automatic.
I’m reminded of B.F. Skinner. I was immersed in behaviorism in an intensive graduate seminar at the University of Minnesota, where I wrote a paper on teaching oneself a new language. Years later, I learned Spanish by applying those very principles.
My new read is Hugh Raffles’ The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on LostTime, a scholarly masterpiece, riveting in its exploration of “unconformity”—the violent rupture where geological strata meet across immense reaches of time: earth’s history, from life’s primitive transition from water to land some 400 million years ago, prodigious in unconformity, cyclic cooling and warming, and sudden, often violent morphings into alien landscapes redolent of ever more evolved flora and fauna; reverberations of random catastrophe, the dominion of the temporal yielding at last the first vertebrates.
So too the human record bears its own unconformities: the clash of values, old and new, secular and religious, progressive and conservative; the collisions of mores, civilizations, and cultures.
I am fascinated, learning so many new things. That is why I relish reading, for with each challenging book I am reborn.
Every now and then, I find myself captivated by a book I stumbled upon by pure serendipity. So much of life is like that, isn’t it?—a lifelong friend suddenly made, an unexpected alpine view, a chance conversation on a plane.
I am currently reading Pam Houston’s Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the HighCountry (2019), a memoir of healing from a traumatic childhood on a remote ranch in the Colorado mountains.
Her writing is electric, sumptuous with vivid metaphor, jolting the reader into an awareness of nature’s turning wheel and inherent vulnerability. She explores the solace of animals, the loyalty of friends who show up in times of need, the sharp contrasts between urban and rural life—all of it intuitive, and all of it beautiful
It is so superbly written that, should I ever need an exit from insomnia, I would choose its audio version to placate the night, inducing deep slumber as swiftly as anesthesia on a patient lying on a surgeon’s table.
What moves me even more than her narrative of healing from life’s traumas on a remote Colorado ranch is Houston’s passionate love for our wounded earth, currently suffering the consequences of human disregard in the pursuit of profit and self-indulgence.
I am imbibing this book not just cerebrally, but emotionally, as it adumbrates my own passion for saving what remains. I cannot fathom a world bequeathed to our children and grandchildren that is absent of seals, humpback whales, polar bears, and salmon-filled streams—a world where the last untouched forests have given way to roads, lumberjacks, and pipelines.
Houston’s book carries a profound urgency, reminding us how little time remains to get our priorities right:
“Something is definitely wrong….The closer one got to the North and South poles, the more dramatic and obvious the effects of climate change. I didn’t want to live in a world without polar bears. I wasn’t sure an ocean without whales in it was any kind of ocean at all. My entire life I had watched, heartbroken, as individual pieces of wilderness that mattered to me got destroyed or developed, but I had believed, for reasons I am not clear on now (propaganda? denial? naïveté?), that the earth contained vast tracts of land humans had not pushed into. Now, I understood this thing we called technology had advanced to a point where no place on the planet was safe from our penchant for destruction. I found myself glad we had never colonized the moon.”
Houston writes here of her 2015 journey as a journalist encountering British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. No roads. No lumberjacks. No liquefied natural gas pipelines.
Five months later, an agreement protecting the rainforest’s fate was reached between the provincial government, the First Nations, and the logging industry, shielding 85 percent of the forest from felling.
Yet, only a few months after that, an inattentive tugboat driver fell asleep at the helm, running his ship and its towed barge aground, releasing more than 110,000 gallons of diesel fuel into the pristine waters of the Great Bear’s Seaforth Channel.
I relish this book for its affirmation of nature’s grandeur, mystery, and moods, and for its acknowledgement that our fellow animals are possessed of unique personalities, emotions, and an astonishing intelligence. Elephants mourn their dead. Chimpanzees recognize themselves in mirrors. And yes, they can suffer—and often do, largely at human hands.
In Houston, I have found a co-conspirator on their behalf, whether the creature is a dog, a horse, a lamb, or even a chicken:
“I had been born knowing that if you held the proper measuring stick, animals would always test smarter than people, and nothing I’ve seen in my lifetime has disabused me of that notion. We may have more complicated language, opposable thumbs and this dangerous thing called reason, but any self-respecting llama or buffalo or spider knows enough not to destroy its own home.”
Houston’s book offers both joy and sorrow, and it is well worth your time. Great books endure long after their final page is turned.
Here I am, back again, recommending another book. I think it comes down to the social creatures we are at heart. Those best portions of our memories—of travel, a good meal, an unexpected kindness—are never isolated; they are more fulfilling when shared.
I’ve been reading Roger Rosenblatt’s Rules for Aging. Its sequel, More Rules forAging, comes out June 2.
Originally published a quarter-century ago, this book is a slim, deceptively simple survival manual for the twilight of life. Rather than offering earnest scientific breakthroughs or dense psychological theories on growing older, Rosenblatt delivers fifty-eight bite-sized, counterintuitive gems of wisdom rooted in a liberating truth: most of the little things we agonize over simply do not matter.
Armed with a rueful, tongue-in-cheek irony, he instructs us to stop defending our character, to run when someone says “we must do this again,” and to realize that nobody is thinking about us anyway.
Rosenblatt’s crystalline writing is breathtaking, the sagacity drawn from a vast repertoire of experience, a way of saying things that startles. Rhythmic in cadence, exhibiting sustained, aphoristic eloquence, it’s a book you’ll want to read, pen in hand.
A learned man—Harvard Ph.D., essay writer extraordinaire, journalist, playwright, and author of more than twenty books—he’s your Renaissance man. In his spare time, he is an accomplished jazz pianist who plays by ear.
Reading Rosenblatt feels as though he’s sitting at a table across from you in a quiet café, conversing like a friend you’ve known all your life and care deeply about. He makes you think, distilling options, engaging your interior life.
With grace, he helps you accept your griefs and regrets, revise your hopes, and embrace aging and ending.
A famed memoirist, he shuns nostalgia, exemplifying the sanctity of life’s daily rituals, whether making toast for a grandchild or paddling a kayak on a foggy morning.
There’s a sadness in finishing anything Rosenblatt writes—his sheer ability to extract wisdom from close observation reveals truths we too often miss. He lingers like the aftermath of a fine wine.
He once wrote of the writer’s calling, words that capture his entire spirit:
“What are we here for? We are here to write our way into the hearts of total strangers… If a piece of writing does not touch, alter, or shake the human heart, it is nothing. It is a beautifully constructed house with no one living inside” (UnlessIt Moves the Heart).
Few twentieth-century writers combine sensual brilliance, personal scandal, and literary influence as completely as the French novelist Colette (1873-1954). Revered in France as one of the great stylists of modern prose, she remains comparatively underread in America. Her life was marked by artistic triumph, erotic independence, moral ambiguity, and deep contradiction, qualities inseparable from the extraordinary vitality of her work.
I hadn’t encountered Colette until I came across reprints of several of her best-known works in the New York Review of Books, including Chéri and The Pure andthe Impure. Curious, I decided to begin at the beginning with Claudine at School, the first of her semi-autobiographical Claudine novels, featuring the rebellious schoolgirl whose wit, sensuality, and independence challenged conventional notions of womanhood as passive, domestic, and sexually muted.
The Claudine novels emerged from one of the most exploitative literary marriages of the era. Colette’s husband, the flamboyant Parisian critic and entrepreneur Willy, recognized her talent and pressured her into writing the series, which was initially published entirely under his own name. The books became enormously successful, while Colette remained publicly overshadowed. Her eventual break from Willy marked not only a personal emancipation but the beginning of her emergence as an independent literary figure.
After reading Claudine at School, I turned to Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman, a massive and meticulous biography produced from nearly a decade of research in French archives and sources.
Thurman had previously written Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1983 and later helped inspire the Academy Award-winning film Out of Africa. She was co-producer.
Her Colette biography became a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, while France honored her with the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2016. She has also been one of the longtime staff writers of The New Yorker.
Yet I suspect many Americans remain only vaguely aware of Colette, even if they have seen Gigi, Vincente Minnelli’s celebrated adaptation of her 1944 novella.
In France, however, Colette long ago entered the cultural canon, the first female president of the prestigious Académie Goncourt, and remains a central figure in the French literary curriculum. Her Claudine novels, Chéri, and Gigi continue to be widely read.
Among her admirers were some of the century’s most distinguished literary figures: Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and even Jean-Paul Sartre. William Faulkner reportedly kept her photograph on his writing desk, a tribute from one master stylist to another.
Upon her death in 1954, she became the first French woman granted a state funeral, though the Catholic Church denied her religious burial because of her divorces and unconventional private life.
Colette’s writings eventually filled more than eighty volumes: novels, memoirs, journalism, literary criticism, essays on theatre, fashion, cuisine, and animals. During the First World War, she even worked as a war correspondent, visiting battlefields and interviewing soldiers.
Yet one finds little overt political or philosophical argument in her work. What distinguishes Colette is her total immersion in the senses. She does not merely describe experience; she inhabits it, merging the physical world with psychological perception.
One feels physically present in her prose: the ripening of a peach, the texture of a cat’s fur, the shifting power between lovers, the ache of aging, the fierce necessity of independence.
Her evocations of her native Burgundy possess extraordinary sensory delicacy:
“Je redescendais… Le jardin frissonnait encore, les roses étaient froides. J’attendais que le premier rayon de soleil touchât le mur, et alors l’odeur du buis montait comme une prière. Tout était bleu, argenté et nacré. C’était un monde où la rosée n’était pas encore de l’eau, mais une sorte de lait céleste qui adoucissait le monde avant que le jaune cruel du jour ne commence à le brûler.”
Translation:
“I would go down into the garden… The garden was still shivering, the roses were cold. I would wait for the first ray of sun to touch the wall, and then the scent of the boxwood would rise like a prayer. Everything was blue, silver, and nacreous. It was a world where the dew was not yet water, but a kind of celestial milk that softened the world before the harsh yellow of the day began to burn it away.”
She was equally perceptive about aging and female self-awareness:
“Elle regarda son reflet — le cou qui commençait à perdre sa tension, le fin réseau de rides autour des yeux qu’aucune poudre ne pouvait vraiment bannir. Elle ne pleura pas ; elle étudia sa ruine comme un général pourrait étudier la carte d’un territoire perdu. Il y avait une magnificence dans cette défaite. Elle se rendait compte qu’être une femme, c’était être une série de peaux, muées l’une après l’autre, jusqu’à ce qu’enfin, on ne reste qu’avec les os de son propre caractère, qui sont, après tout, les seules choses qui durent vraiment.”
Translation:
“She looked at her reflection—the neck that was beginning to lose its tension, the fine web of lines around the eyes that no amount of powder could truly banish. She did not weep; she studied her ruin as a general might study a map of a lost territory. There was a magnificence in this defeat. She realized that to be a woman was to be a series of skins, shed one after the other, until finally one is left with only the bones of one’s own character, which are, after all, the only things that truly endure.”
She also possessed an uncanny sensitivity toward animals, especially cats:
“Elle restait là, ombre gris-argent, ses yeux comme deux raisins translucides. Elle ne se contentait pas de regarder ; elle humait la chambre. Ses oreilles bougeaient comme de petits radars indépendants, captant le bruit d’une aile de phalène ou le tassement lointain de la maison. Dans son immobilité, il y avait une concentration terrible et belle — l’orgueil d’une créature qui s’appartient tout entière et ne doit aucune explication au monde.”
Translation:
“She lay there, a silver-grey shadow, her eyes like two translucent grapes. She did not merely watch; she inhaled the room. Her ears moved like small, independent radars, catching the sound of a moth’s wing or the distant settling of the house. In her stillness there was a terrible, beautiful concentration—the pride of a creature that belongs entirely to itself and owes no explanation to the world.”
Colette’s private life, however, remains controversial. Her relationships were often transgressive; she had a strained relationship with her daughter, engaged in an affair with her teenage stepson, and continued publishing in journals associated with Vichy France during the Nazi occupation.
Thurman describes Colette’s maternal style as one of “ruthless detachment.” Much of the child-rearing was delegated to a nanny. Mother and daughter frequently quarreled. At one point, returning from boarding school, her daughter reportedly remarked that she wished they were Jewish because Jewish parents seemed more emotionally involved with their children.
Thurman suggests that Colette regarded motherhood as an intrusion upon the artistic life—a conflict that has shadowed many women writers navigating the competing demands of creativity, erotic freedom, and domestic expectation.
Her conduct during the Nazi occupation remains morally ambiguous. Although she used her connections to secure the release of her Jewish husband from internment, she nevertheless continued publishing under the Vichy regime, actions critics still debate. Thurman offers a pragmatic possibility: survival.
In many respects, Colette embodied contradiction, shaped by a conservative provincial upbringing while seeking freedoms historically reserved for men.
Though later embraced by many feminists as a symbol of female independence, Colette often denounced feminism, once remarking that women “deserved the whip and the harem.” In a 1927 interview with Walter Benjamin, she suggested that women wielding power could become “worse than men.” Bisexual and involved in numerous relationships with women, she nevertheless disapproved of her own daughter’s lesbianism, perhaps knowing the difficulties of gay life, Thurman suggests.
And yet, despite these contradictions, Colette helped redefine what modern womanhood could be. She fashioned a public life of artistic independence, sexual autonomy, and professional achievement at a time when few such paths existed openly for women.
French culture has often shown a greater willingness than Anglo-American culture to celebrate women who combine sensual freedom with intellectual authority, as seen in figures such as George Sand and Simone de Beauvoir. Colette belongs within that lineage, though she remains more elusive, less ideological, and ultimately more instinctive than either.
Thurman’s biography succeeds precisely because it resists simplification. She neither canonizes nor condemns Colette, but instead reveals a woman of immense artistic gifts, profound appetites, emotional blind spots, courage, vanity, discipline, selfishness, and brilliance.
Above all, Colette endures because of the precision and sensual richness of her prose. Few writers have rendered nature, animals, desire, aging, and the textures of ordinary experience with such tactile immediacy and lyrical control. Whatever her personal failings, her writing continues to justify the devotion of her readers and her enduring place in French literature.
I’ve finished my clustered reading of Wendell Berry with his Port William novel, Hannah Coulter, and feel I know him now as an adamant lover of the old ways: the community of belonging; simpler living and inherited traditions; the sanctity of the family farm; nature’s cyclic wheel, ushering change and mortality’s inevitable visit; the enduring power of love to redeem life’s frequent anguish.
Reading Wendell Berry has made me more mindful of what truly matters and, like him, I mourn the passing of a better way of life—less angry, more humane, sustaining in the daily beneficence of the familiar and the abiding.
Brimmings: up from the well 