Unodious Comparisons
Make the most and best of your lot, and compare yourself not with the few that are above you, but with the multitudes which are below you. –Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life of…
Category: World Literature
Look on the Bright Side
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. –Oscar Wilde, quoted in Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples
A Carpe Diem Reminder
The certainty that life cannot be long, and the probability that it will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform….
A Mosaicist
… Proust had never been able to finish any work of fiction because he lacked the story and point of view. He had at last found his structure, one that was to prove ideal…
Dr. Johnson and Jane Austen
One unblushing admirer of the Dictionary was Jane Austen’s father, who assembled a substantial collection of books by Johnson, by his friends and associates, and about both the man and his circle. Inspired by her…
A Healing Pleasure
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or…
City Lights Journal, Revisited
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, ed. City Lights Journal #4 See AlsoFerlinghetti, Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination Thursday 28 May 2018Cami gave me three Fabriano notebooks, and I had an itch to start in one of…
With Gratitude for Rexroth
Kenneth Rexroth, 100 Poems from the JapaneseNew Directions, 1964 Dear EJ Kenneth Rexroth—poet, polymath, anarchist, and pacifist—is a fine guide to Chinese and Japanese poetry. He provided six books of translation for the enrichment of…
Then and Now
“Brothers, do not be afraid of men’s sin, love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, both the whole…