Author: Mark J. Chmiel

Today’s One-Liner (#11)

Method of investigation— as soon as one has arrived at any position, try to find in what sense the contrary is true. –Simone Weil, Waiting for God

Honesty & Humility

There is a story that Po always showed his poems to an uneducated old servant-woman, and anything she couldn’t understand, he rewrote. –David Hinton on Po Chü-i, in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese…

Today’s One-Liner (#10)

On ne donne rien si libéralement que ses conseils.  –La Rochefoucauld, Maxim #110 One gives nothing so liberally as pieces of advice. –Translation by Stuart D. Warner and Stéphane DouardSt. Augustine’s Press, 2001

All Our Relations

All women are mothers and sisters, and all men are fathers and brothers in God’s family.–Maharajji, in Ram Dass, Miracle of Love: Stories about Neem Karoli Baba Oh humanityI am your grateful son.Every man my…

Searching

It was in Kafka that Scholem discovered a kind of heretical, secular Kabbalah, a literature paradoxically at once canonical and nihilistic. With Max Brod and Walter Benjamin, Scholem saw in Kafka a deeply Jewish writer,…

Gratitude/2

For my teacher Marc H. Ellis who gave me apt advice when I nervously started started teaching in 1997: “Don’t worry about what the students give to you. Just give everything you’ve got to your…

What’s Missing

During the thousand years of her history Russia had seen many great things. During the Soviet period the country had seen global military victories, vast construction sites, whole new cities, dams across the Dnieper and…

Gratitude/1

For Dr. Erin Nealon, who introduced me to Jojo [Jonathan Richman] circa early 2000. Even right now as I write this, I’ve got That Summer Feeling… We still need more parties in the USA.