Making and Taking Notes
When anything of interest happens within or around me I make a mental note to tell you about it, and it is this habit of thinking of things in connection with you that gives them…
Virtue Signaling in the 19th Century
“Therefore the task for me is not to change my own life, as I thought at first, but as far as I can to aid in improving the position of those unfortunates who have evoked…
Microscopic Moments
In order to help ourselves change, we must become aware that breaking from our normal ways of being is what makes it possible to develop different sides of ourselves. Rituals—in the Confucian sense—are transformative because…
Of Course, A Russian Would Say This
A book is a square chunk of hot, smoking conscience–and nothing else!–Boris Pasternak, quoted in Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
For Sure
Surely there can be nothing to distinguish us from the beasts, if we simply devote ourselves to greed and never turn our hearts to the Buddhist truth.—Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness What is a man,If…
New Life
Later I’m back in New York sitting around with Irwin and Simon and Raphael and Lazarus, and now we’re famous writers more or less, but they wonder why I’m so sunk now, so unexcited as…
A Question about a Film
The call commands us bear the burden of our neighbor and it elects us to shoulder our responsibilities for another, through the minute details of living everyday in the world.—Ira F. Stone, A Responsible Life:…
Inexpressible, Expressible
Whether culmination or aberration of history, the Holocaust transcends history. Everything about it inspires fear and leads to despair. The dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of…
Facing Death, Cherishing Life: A Spring-Summer Class
We are not limited to our physical body, even when we are alive. We inter-are with our ancestors, our descendants, and the whole of the cosmos. We do not have a separate self; we are…
Share the Wealth with Kelsey Shaver: Dancing the In-Between
The word “liminal” comes from the Latin word for a threshold or doorway. Transitions in life are normal, but what happens when the doorway becomes prolonged, like a passage or tunnel? My name is Kelsey….