Today’s One-Liner (#6)

The face offers itself to your compassion and to your obligation.  –Emmanuel Levinas, in Jill Robbins, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas

Up to Me

Buddhist nontheism teaches us that no one else is going to liberate us. We are each responsible for our own liberation. Thus, self-self-liberation first is most important because without self-self-liberation true compassion, the fuel to…

Train Wholeheartedly

 Attention [prosoche] is the fundamental Stoic spiritual  attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit. Thanks to this attitude, the philosopher…

Undeclinable

Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations With Phillippe Nemo Emmanuel Levinas and Jill Robbins, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas A person dear to me is finishing her…

The Reading Life/1

The Chasm between Them and Us Kadya Molodovsky, A Jewish Refugee in New York: Rivke Zilberg’s JournalTranslated by Anita Norich The accomplished Yiddish writer Molodovsky wrote this novel in serialized form in 1940-41, knowing obviously…

What Is Vaster

In the early 1980s Harold Bloom noted about his experience of decades at Yale University that “[t]here is a profound falling away from what I would call ‘text-centeredness” among the current generation of American undergraduates,…

What Is Vaster

In the early 1980s Harold Bloom noted about his experience of decades at Yale University that “[t]here is a profound falling away from what I would call ‘text-centeredness” among the current generation of American undergraduates,…

Primacy

“[Shoshani] didn’t teach piety; he taught the texts. The texts are more fundamental—and vaster—than piety. “ –Emmanuel Levinas