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…
Category: Reading
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…
Her Vivacity Gladdened Life
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Knopf: Everyman’s Library, 1992 I’ve acknowledged previously the importance of Reinaldo Arenas and Eduardo Galeano during the late 1990s into 2000 as I was trying to figure out…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine/9
400. If a man reads a book because it interests him and reads in all directions for the same reason, his reading is pure and interests me. –Ralph Waldo Emerson 500. The poor play a…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine/8
51. Neal looks older, Jewish, very serious and on powerful integrity drive. –Allen Ginsberg, letter to Jack Kerouac 151. In the beginner’s mind there is no thought, “I have attained something.” All self-centered thoughts limit…
This Week
What I’m Reading This Week Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian Aharon Shabtai, War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems Nathan A. Scott, Mirrors of Man…
A Page of Mev’s Notes on Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”
Patricia Geier and I are reading and discussing Nathan A. Scott’s book, Mirrors of Man in Existentialism. This morning after having read the chapter on Buber, I went to my shelves and pulled off I…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine/5
7. Our monkey-minds are like these agitated monsters that are wanting this and collecting that, always grabbing, grabbing, grabbing. The process of cooling out that agitation takes time, and that’s hard for the agitated mind…
Reading of Dorothy’s Reading
The Dorothy Day Book, compiled by Margaret Quigley and Michael Garvey, is a kind of posthumous commonplace book, that is, a collection of quotations from Dorothy’s decades of reading (largely from her column in the…
Not So Random Entries, Commonplace Moleskine /2
40. The principal truth is this: latent in every act of complete reading is the compulsion to write a book in reply. The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in…