7 for Sunday

Nick Cave’s mother had years of advice largely unheeded — and then one day simply said “head high and…” and that was it. In that spirit, the issue builds its own complete sentence: No. Then, immediately after, Yes — to the one correct next thing. Wagashi changes with the seasons at a Japanese garden in Portland. And the most reliable way to change your entire life turns out to be not changing your entire life.

A list of 101 movies that all tied for last place among 2,000 greatest films — each recommended by exactly one person and no one else — turns out to be a surprisingly superior guide to being surprised and delighted than any Top 10 list. Around it: commonplace books as the original solution to the information explosion, the singular root of the word “priority,” and the hard-won admission that things I enjoy get done, and things I don’t are a struggle. This is the way.

A funeral procession ascending Mt Haguro’s cedar-lined stone stairway in summer mist — on the same path Bashō walked in 1689 — arrives alongside a hard-won insight about knowledge systems: Grimoire, the personal digital grimoire, has finally revealed that any incantation found within can never simply be incanted. Knowledge without experience and expertise is only half the magic. Ram Dass, characteristically, offers the fastest path to enlightenment.

The word “brand” carries two definitions sitting in horrible proximity to each other — a company’s product identity, and a mark burned into livestock, criminals, or slaves. From there: Godin on skipping the clown car, Feynman on leaving the door to the unknown ajar, and a useful exit ramp from the over-thinking spiral — asking whether, if you could answer all these questions, it would actually enable you to do something.

The pen is a physical reminder that you’re not reading passively — you have an obligation to respond. The Muse, meanwhile, rewards those it finds working, and scoffs at the ones who think they’ll just remember. The issue also reveals that the nose is actually two noses working in alternating cycles somehow connected to the armpits, which turns out to be exactly the kind of rabbit hole Gray’s Anatomy was made for.

You can see your own white blood cells moving through your own eye by staring at a blue sky — which is either the takeaway, or evidence that wonders never cease, or something else entirely. The issue also features Aldous Huxley’s defense of Latin grammar as excellent preparation for life not as it ought to be but as it actually is, and a personal observation from 1989 that the Internet was social and interesting long before anyone thought to wonder whether it might remake society.