Literature
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Summer, 1990
What I saw was this: Across the room, her body draped across his, bed sheets wrapped around legs. Her face smiling, defiant. His sheepish, triumphant. I wasn’t shocked or embarrassed, this was my summer on the Left Bank after all. Naked bodies lolling in old apartments was why I crossed the Atlantic. These things happened in…
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What I’m Reading #7
Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance. My conservative brother-in-law sent me this book. It arrived in an Amazon pouch, with no note or accoutrements – just something I “needed to read.” Now John is a very smart man, but almost right of The Right. So I assumed it would be overtly political – a Trumpish screed sent…
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What I’m Reading #6
Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov. I read a lot of Asimov in high-school and college, including some of the Foundation novels, and recently grabbed this one, the 2nd in the classic series about a future “Star Wars”-type existence with the evil Empire groaning under its long dominance over the galaxies (a la Rome), and the…
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What I’m Reading #5
The Path, by Michael Puett & Christine Gross-Loh. Came across this on contemporary philospoher Nigel Warburton’s list of the “Top Five Philosophy Books of 2016”. I studied rhetoric and history at UC Berkeley, a wonderfully rich education, but received little exposure to Eastern literature and philosophy – Path promises distilled and meaningful insight into Chinese…
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What I’m Reading #4
The Americans, by Robert Frank. The essential American photo journal – a peak at the real America in brilliant black and white. Each picture a frame of humanity, its celebrations and struggles. Very inspirational (see my poem “Elevator Musings”). An Officer And A Spy, by Robert Harris. I love historical fiction, especially when it really captures a time…
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What I’m Reading #3
Sun Under Wood, by Robert Hass. Selected poems from the great American poet. I’ve always been drawn to Hass’ natural insights, textual flow, great imagery, etc. Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius (translated by Gregory Hays). Never intended for publication, this incredible “self-help” journal, one of the great journals of all time, provides timeless insights and recommendations…
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A Prologue . . .
“The one that knows the beginning and the end, and knows the logos that runs through all things and that assigns to all a place, each in its allotted span, throughout the whole of time.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, circa 170 A.D. You could hear the buzz from the Logos, like cicadas pulsing on a hot, humid night…
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Connecting
Existentialism is a humanism. Actually, it is. It asks us to focus on our current lives, not dwell on a past or future that may not even exist. Or to fixate on why we can’t do something, to hold onto constraints – and Lord knows we all have constraints – as the reason for not…
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Sartre, Now
Jean Paul Sartre writes about now; about here: what he is experiencing and feeling at any given moment; and most intriguingly, what the objects around him ‘feel’ and project and demand. He is ‘present’ as we would now say, watching and trying, very hard, to capture the essence of being human, of existing in an…
Words to Live By
One evening I saw a red sunset, its rays falling on the trunks and foliage of pines growing among a tumble of rocks, coloring the trunks and foliage with orange fire. It was superb.
— Vincent van Gogh
Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation . . .
— Albert Einstein
Learning is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
— T. H. White
It was as if God had lifted his baton sharply above the endless orchestration of the seas, and the eternal movement had stopped, suspended in the timeless architecture of the absolute.
— Thomas Wolfe
I’m not saying ability doesn’t matter. It certainly helps. But there’s something powerful about realizing that you’ve undersold yourself — that somehow your mind confused lack of effort for inability.
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
— Simone de Beauvoir
Learning is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.
— T. H. White
We read to know we are not alone.
— C.S. Lewis
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
— Albert Camus
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
— Simone Weil
I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.
— Simone de Beauvoir
There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now; And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
— Walt Whitman
Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
The process: sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the flow of the narrative on track — requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine.
— Haruki Murakami
Man is nothing other than his own project. He exists only to the extent that he realizes himself, therefore he is nothing more than the sum of his actions, nothing more than his life.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe