“The world’s otherness is antidote to confusion,” Mary Oliver wrote in her moving account of what saved her life. But otherness can also be the most beautiful ground for connection - in slicing through the surface unlikenesses, we can discover a deep wellspring of kinship, which in turn enlarges our understanding of ourselves and the other. Otherness has always been how we define ourselves - by contrast and distinction from what is unlike us, we find out what we are like: As I have previously written, we are what remains after everything we are not. (And in this spirit of timelessness, treat yourself to their counterparts from 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010.) BEAR AND WOLF Here are the loveliest such timeless, ageless illustrated philosophies for living that I read in 2018. Although written with children in mind, they speak to the eternal child that each of us lives with and answers to, but often neglects - something Antoine de Saint-Exupéry knew and articulated beautifully in dedicating The Little Prince to the little boy inside his grown-up best friend. They are exquisite distillations of philosophies for living, addressing in the language of children - which is the language of absolute sincerity, so countercultural in our age of cynicism - the deepest, most eternal truths about what it means to live a meaningful, beautiful, inspired, noble life. It is a special book, yes, but it is not singular in being a testament to something I have long believed: that great children’s books transcend both age and time. Once a year, every year, I reread The Little Prince and manage to find in it new layers of loveliness and wisdom each time, always seemingly written to allay whatever my greatest struggle at that moment is.
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