Thought for the End of One Year and the Beginning of Another
“Why count the days, when even one day is enough for man to know all happiness. My dears, why do we quarrel, boast before each other, remember each other’s offenses? Let us go to the…
Month: December 2018
Saturday Share the Wealth with Our Diane di Prima Class: Making the World Bearable
What I saw then was this fairly obvious faculty of art: that it goes on, it lasts a bit longer that our frail human lives—it offers comfort. The vision is more enduring than our persons—it…
Gratitude/899
A predictably wonderful thing about late December–getting to see Thuy Khuu when she comes back for a visit.
Neither Conformism Nor Eccentricity
John Armstrong, Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007 Almost twelve years ago I read this book, and the themes of Bildung and mastery were most…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine/10
111. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction. –Simone Weil 222. When [Arthur Waley] was at work, all else was eliminated. –Ivan Morris 333. Whenever I…
Share the Wealth 2018
Thanks to my/our friends–those who shared with us, those who hosted, and those who came, opened, and listened. Like my student Anlin, I’m one of the richest people around. Harvest in Occupied Palestine: Lea Koesterer…
Why Do They Come to Hinder Us?
Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (La Trahison des Clercs) [1927] Julien Benda’s Treason of the Intellectuals can be read as a gloss on the Dreyfus Affair. In this polemic against intellectuals who have…
Birthday Greetings to Dianne Lee
You have been for many decades A light in the darkness Countless people (and creatures) You have loved and sacrificed for It’s true, Love is the best Resistance— How come NPR hasn’t interviewed you these…
Transmitting Beauty
Donald Keene, Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan Columbia University Press, 2008 The first sentence of George Steiner’s first book (on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) reads: “Literary criticism should arise out…